


Verdant Flower, Crimson Wind

by Runeless



Series: Verdant Flower, Crimson Wind [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: A very important fisherwoman, Alternate Universe, Azure Snows, Beings of Darkness, Body Horror, Burdens of Divinity, But also, Canon-Typical Violence, Claude and Poisons is the true OTP, Crimson Wind, Depression, Dorothea's Hat is Gone and Everyone's Really Concerned About Its Whereabouts, F/F, F/M, Gonerils are monsters, Homunculi, Interlude I is a dark chapter, Lots of war, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Mental Illness, Morality Flip, Not by main characters, PTSD, Pain, Perspective Flip, Rhea is a monster, Scars, Silver Moon, Some Shit Going Down, Story Route Flip, TW: slavery, Ungrid, Verdant Flower, War, backstory is pain, but better safe than sorry, chili - Freeform, falls - Freeform, godhood, it's backstory stuff, it's not explicit, lots of the turtle, so much warfare, sometimes, trigger warning, tw, tw: PTSD, tw: body horror, tw: child abuse, tw: depression, tw: experimentation, tw: implied rape, tw: mental illness, tw: poison, tw: strangulation, tw: torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2020-12-12 05:36:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 137,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20997215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runeless/pseuds/Runeless
Summary: In another world, Edelgard von Hresvelg, Emperor of the Adrestian Empire after the Tragedy of Brigid murdered her family, and her professor, a possessed woman with her own secrets, seek to unravel the mystery of the masked man who attacks Garreg Mach, the Storm Caller.In which the players are the same, but the board is so very different.





	1. When We Were Children

**Author's Note:**

> Holy shit, this was fun to write. 
> 
> Had the idea from some Tumblr art people have done of the characters in different positions throughout Three Houses- in particular, one of Edelgard missing an eye.
> 
> I'm still finishing Crown of Antlers, but this plot bunny jumped me and bit me in the ass so I have to do this.
> 
> Contact me at my tumblr! https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mr-laugh

**WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN**

Edelgard's first day at Garreg Mach goes poorly, almost entirely because someone tries to kill her. Tries to kill her and her two compatriots, Dimitri of the Kingdom and Claude of the Alliance; they are saved only by a strange mercenary with an expressionless face. Claude in particular almost dies, the stranger's sword the one thing that keeps the bandit from taking his head off.

Edelgard, for her part, does alright, but the nightmares swarm over her that night. Brigid afire, its people dying, risking her own life to save Petra, her siblings dead, mother, father...

When Petra shakes her awake, she is so grateful she clings to her, cries quietly into her arms. Petra, ever-stoic, simply holds her. Edelgard does not deserve Petra's devotion, but at the moment, she will take it, cling to it as any drowning soul clings to their rescuer.

The next day is better, because no one tries to kill them, and she can amuse herself watching the mercenaries and Claude, who seems to have gotten rather entranced by his savior. The woman's name is Byleth, and Edelgard gets the fascination; she likes men and women both, and this woman has much to write home about. Claude is head over heels, too; only Dimitri seems unaffected, even as he obviously checks her out, which makes her wonder about the rumors of himself and his Duscurian bodyguard.

Not that she'd blame him if there _was _romance there; the tale of Dedue and Dimitri is well-known, even in distant Enbarr. The tale said that Dimitri's knight, Dedue, had saved Dimitri's life from a monster at a young age, when Dedue himself was just the son of chefs; Dimitri's grateful parents had showered him with honors, and even sponsored him now, to go to Garreg Mach and fulfill his dreams of being a knight.

A romantic tale, she must admit, though she has no such romance in her own life. No one has ever rescued Edelgard but Petra, before, and she owes Petra a mountain of lives, she owes her all her murdered people, so no matter how grateful she is, it is always underlined with her grief at how much more she owes the purple-haired beauty and her slaughtered people.

She sees their ghosts often enough, even without such reminders.

But Dedue has no such history; Duscur has and always will be Faerghus' most esteemed and trusted ally, their great trading partner and friend, who had helped them defeat the Adrestian Empire at their beginning, who was themselves rescued from Dagda by Kingdom loyalists. In turn and at each turn, the two nations have chosen to support each other, even in extremity, even when cynicism would dictate otherwise; and now the two share a special bond that goes beyond the usual practical politics of nations, a much celebrated friendship that has stood the test of time. Duscurian nobility mingles freely with Faerghus, and there are those of mixed blood on both sides of the border.

The Church in Faerghus rails about it, but it is the one thing that Faerghus does not obey the Church in; holy Kingdom it may be, but it values loyalty too much to toss aside the foreigners who aided it. And the Western Church always finds excuses to claim that Duscurians are Fodlanese anyway, claims they are descended from groups once made by the Goddess, or that they were founded by some lost colony of Agarthans, before Seiros' war wiped them all from the face of the planet. Lies, but the kind believed in and treasured, no matter how much it frustrates the Archbishop in his tower at Garreg Mach.

And so there are no dead between Dimitri and Dedue, no ghosts, no history of horrors. Just rescue and heroism; a fine enough recipe for romance, Edelgard supposes.

She is drawn out of her musings by the attempts of the two men to woo the mercenary to their side for one reason or another. Edelgard, who stays quiet so no one knows about the rage and despair inside, merely smirks at their hamfisted attempts, and when the mercenary asks- in a dead, blank tone- if Edelgard wishes to make an offer to her, too, the princess merely shrugs and says, “ I wouldn't mind, but I'm not going to bother you about it.”

The answer pleases the strange woman, who favors her with the tiniest smile before her face resets to its default blank stare.

They finally reach Garreg Mach after a good day's walk, where the Church of the Spirit has set up shop, where they remember the murdered Goddess and praise Nemesis, who freed the land from the yoke of dragons, who fought the Goddess' own daughter and emerged triumphant.

It is a point of pride for Edelgard that she is his descendant, that Adrestia comes from his bloodline; and she likes the stained glass she sees, of her ancestor, the rough barbarian of a man that he was, crowned in fire, wielding the Sword of the Creator, gifted to him after the Goddess' death. There are other stained glass of him, of course- flanking the very tall one she admires is one of him battling Seiros alongside his noble companions, and another of him establishing the laws that would guide Adrestia- but the one she likes best is the one that shows him as the rough, ugly, _human _king he was- just a man. A man worthy of the Goddess' attention.

Edelgard is not very religious herself- no help from above has ever been present when she needed it- but she cannot really blame the Goddess for being dead, so she is at peace with the Church, though sometimes she wonders how things would be different, if Sothis had not died, if the Goddess had lived. If perhaps the horror of her life might have been averted, had Fodlan a living deity to watch over it, instead of a dead one.

But one might as well wish that Agartha had not burned in dragonfire, that Shambhala was not lost, and all the technology that was once mankind's had not been torn apart by Seiros. If wishes were horses, even beggars would ride, as they say.

They end up before Solon, descendant of ancient Agartha- as all Archbishops are required to be- and he seems a bit off-put by the mercenary and her father, who apparently have some history with the Church. Well, he's off-put by the father, anyway; the daughter he seems... most interested in.

Interested enough that he offers her a job as a teacher, to replace the one that ran away during the attack. They're all surprised, and none more so than Edelgard when, given the choice of houses, Byleth gives the one answer Edelgard never expected.

“ Black Eagles,” the mercenary says. “ I wish to teach Edelgard's class.”

And so, having made only the barest attempt at an offer, Edelgard proves herself her compatriots' superior in diplomacy, and acquires the grand prize.

(She will remember this, later, and wonder how different things would have been without Byleth- and shudders, to consider those futures.)

-

Byleth is a genius, and also the funniest person Edelgard has ever met. Edelgard is a very careful woman, she keeps others unaware of just how off she really is by projecting an air of calm, quiet confidence, but Byleth keeps breaking down her barriers by accident; the blank-faced woman is the ultimate straight man, she makes everything around her funnier with her sheer indifference. Caspar's passion smashes against the rocks of Byleth's disinterest in hilarious fashion; Ferdinand's dramatics fall so flat in the face of Byleth's blank stare that it is impossible not to laugh. Each class is a riot of accidental comedy.

Dorothea joins her in this, and Dorothea is... the _prettiest _woman Edelgard has ever met, she is gorgeous beyond compare, and something in her heats up when she looks at her, something that has been dead for ages inside her.

And Dorothea seems to... to like her too. When Caspar bothers her to sing- something Dorothea has told him she will not do on command- Edelgard reprimands him, and Dorothea favors her with a wink. Edelgard is sure her face is a crimson flower, blooming red, and it only grows worse when Dorothea says that she might sing for Edelgard, where she will not sing for Caspar. Byleth saves the day by settling the class down, but Edelgard is full of warm tingles for the rest of the day, and even loyal Petra cracks a joke about it later.

It's nice... and so it hurts that she has to pack that away. Life is not for her. Death haunts her too much. She has debts she must pay, she has a goal she must meet, people she must kill. Dorothea's beauty, Dorothea's lovely voice, Dorothea's attentions... she cannot have these things. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

But... also maybe someday. She clings to that, and over the course of the next few months- as they serve Solon directly, the Church taking a distinct interest in the Eagles- Edelgard begins, slowly, to make friends with her classmates. Shy, broken Bernadette is the first, Edelgard sensing pain in her like her own, and reaching out. Bernie's own childhood rivals Edelgard's for horror, though less death haunts the purple-haired girl. She grows to feel... protective of her, taking her homework to her when she cannot work up the will to leave her room, sitting outside her door and talking to her when she needs it, delivering meals, too, when her terror means she cannot leave her room to eat.

Acts unbefitting of a princess, perhaps, but Edelgard has never felt like royalty since the night she found out she could not stop her countrymen from committing genocide; and so to do these small acts of kindness, it calms her, it keeps the nightmares at bay. It helps Bernie, too, who ends up leaving her room more often, though only for short bursts- but it is progress, yet, and it gives Edelgard hope that her own madness can be faced, that she, too, can make progress.

Dorothea approves of it, approves so much that she joins in, seems to ignore the furious blush on Edelgard's face as the opera singer helps her out. She has heard Dorothea speak of her kindness, speak of _her _with _praise _and... and her heart thump-thumps, trembles inside her. Goddess, her insides feel like soup, and Dorothea just keeps stirring the pot.

To calm down, she pets the cats, who end up congregating at her door, where she works to make sure there is a dish of food at all times; she likes animals, they do not judge her, and taking care of something else has always been a balm for her suffering soul. She loves the cats, and they often follow her, watching over their friend. Edelgard even names them- her favorites are Little Orange and Big White, because Edelgard is so bad at names that even Petra, ever-faithful, has given up on her in that area.

Sly, shadowy Hubert approaches her of his own accord one day, while she's tending her cats; it turns out that he is from a family that has traditionally served her own. She'd never known. After Brigid, after... everything, she was placed in so many far-flung places that she lost all connection with her family line. She has no idea who owes her, or why.

But Hubert remembers the ancient debt, tells her that his family descends from Nemesis' dark mage, who owed his life to Nemesis, and swore that him and his family would serve Nemesis and his family all their days. Edelgard at first dismisses the debt, but Hubert seems almost eager to serve, seems excited to take his place in the great stage of history, proud of family traditions. Edelgard has no such things left, the idea of a family tradition is a foreign and fascinating concept to her- the idea of a bloodline keeping such things, such memories. It is beautiful, to Edelgard, whose father, stepmother and siblings all died, who has no family at all.

So while he'll never replace Petra as her retainer- she has grown too used to trusting the Brigidian, too used to letting her handle all the issues a retainer does- she is grateful for his unquestioning support. It helps that he has a different take on things; more clever, more cunning, more edged. Petra calls him a snake, at one point, but with great approval, and explains that in Brigid, serpents are admired for their sneaky wisdom and cleverness; Hubert, rather than taking offense, seems delighted by the comparison, and he spends much time with Petra. At first the discussion is of serving Edelgard, but later the discussions turn... private, and Edelgard is surprised by that more than anything. Petra is so used to Adrestian contempt for her origins that she's never had a friend but Edelgard before, and definitely nothing more...

Edelgard is extremely supportive of it. Petra needs more friends, and more... well, more. More people who care about her. Hubert's easy acceptance of the Brigid woman and genuine interest raises him high in Edelgard's eyes; and when he (non-lethally) poisons a Church guard who had been rude to Petra and forces him to miss his shifts, Edelgard claps for joy as he regales them with the tale.

(He'd bought the poison off Claude. Edelgard will think, later, that she should have paid more attention to that.)

Ferdinand and Caspar are a strange duo to become friends with, both fire like her, but in different ways. Edelgard is afraid of fire, not just because she saw Brigid burn but because she knows her true self, the self inside the fake shell of the calm and collected Emperor-to-be that she wears; she is fire, too, but the kind that doesn't stop, the kind that can't be controlled. It renders it awkward at first, to be friends with them, but time wears her barriers down; she comes to understand them.

Caspar's fire is blue, like his hair, fire turned so tightly and intensely towards a goal that it shines like the sky; battle, and the love of it, and passionate joy in combat. That she gets, that fire is part of her fire, the joy that drives her ghosts away, at least for a while, though her berserker nature makes it harder to control than Caspar's simple... _delight _in violence. He relishes combat, and she wishes her own love of battle could be so pure, did not have the edge of desperation that drives her to furious overkill.

Still, it's fun to match axes against him, she's less afraid she'll hurt him than she is with the others, and when he tells her that they are both proud members of Team Short and Violent, she bursts into surprised laughter. Caspar holds it as a victory for a full week.

Ferdinand, meanwhile, is fire at its calmest, to the extent fire can be calm; a campfire, warm and peaceful, or maybe something like a sun. Edelgard wonders if she can be like that, someday, if maybe getting revenge for Brigid and her murdered family will grant her peace enough that she can be like Ferdinand.

He wants to be her rival, but she manages to effortlessly defang him simply by telling him the truth- that she finds him far her superior. Edelgard is a blunt weapon who barely functions on her best days, but Ferdinand is a noble with a nobleman's sense of duty, and other than the fact that Dorothea hates him for some reason, he has nothing against him at all; he is a perfect gentleman, a true noble. She admires him, to be honest, that he can so effortlessly be the person she pretends to be- and that very pretense is why she knows he's not faking, she has grown able to tell those who fake it like her from those for whom it is an honest, heartfelt thing.

Ferdinand doesn't know what to do with that, so they settle on being friends, and she takes him into her ever-growing circle of companions, and into her confidence, lets the shining star that is his nature guide her, help her make the false persona she constructs just a little more real.

Linhardt she befriends last of her Eagles, mostly because she has the least contact with him due to his narcoleptic habits. But what begins as her berating him for not living up to the standards of the Eagles becomes, to her surprise, a conversation about the past and about effort that leaves her mind spinning. Linhardt turns out to be the smartest of them all, to her surprise he may be the smartest person she has _ever_ met, and every conversation with him broadens her mind.

Lazy, yes- but not merely smart, but _wise_. There are depths to the wind mage, and she sees what Caspar sees in his boyfriend, though she cannot see what the two find in each other- like the opposite poles of a magnet, they are. But romance is not something Edelgard understands; her feelings for Dorothea are the first time she has ever _wanted _someone, and her schoolgirl crush is just that.

Two more students join a few months in, poached by Byleth to fill holes in their ranks. Raphael, from the Alliance, is an enormous giant of a man, recruited because, besides Caspar and herself, the Black Eagles lack any real powerhouses in the physical arena- and he came because his family has always been merchants, and he knows much of Adrestia and its cuisine.

He is a delightful compatriot; no manners and less elegance, but kindness and honest generosity roll off of him like waves, and Edelgard enjoys hearing him talk about his sister, the way she always enjoys hearing people talk about family. It is something she will never have, and so she sucks it in by proxy. Raphael is so gentle that even Bernie, who is so scared of people, soon learns that she is absolutely safe near him, and he reminds Edelgard of stories she's heard of the good dragons, those few manaketes who, led by Saint Cethlean, turned against Seiros during the great war. He is like that fabled tribe, so vast and huge, but so gentle.

Annette is their other transfer, joining to learn more magic at her father's request. A sharper contrast could not be found; tiny and sorcerous where Raphael is huge and physical, added because her father is a friend of Byleth's and asked. His daughter's passion has always been magic, and Adrestians know magic better than anyone; Byleth had been amenable. Edelgard wonders if her own father would have liked her tendencies towards axes and magic, if he would have indulged her, but her mind skitters away from the thought. It hurts too much, even now.

Annette fills the days with talk of her family and a passion for magic that even wakes Linhardt up, though it comes with a tendency to cause absurd chain-reaction accidents that, if nothing else, make Edelgard extremely knowledgeable about first aid, and aware of where they keep the vulneraries and elixirs. Often she tends the girl, who apologizes first, and then goes off on energetic speeches that drag even reluctant Edelgard into interest, as she patches her wounds. Annette seems born in the wrong country, to Edelgard; she has an Alliance mouth and an Adrestian love of scholarship, she shares nothing with cold Faerghus and its stoic obsession with honor. Strange girl.

Last, but never least- first in all her thoughts- is Dorothea. Dorothea, who is an angel in human form, who Edelgard cannot help but be flustered by, who seems to see something in Edelgard that she's certain she doesn't have. Edelgard stumbles towards something like friendship, with this girl who torments her so, who seems to find delight in teasing her and rendering her a mess. Edelgard does not understand it, but wants her too much to complain.

( Edelgard does not know this, but Dorothea sees a simple thing in Edelgard: she sees the truth. She sees a noble princess who brings food to shut-ins, who plays with the monastery's cats, who tends to the wounds of klutzy foreigners and somehow manages to find worth in all her fellow Black Eagles. Who saved Petra, all those years ago, who is haunted in her eyes, but does not let her inner pain drive her to cruelty. Dorothea sees Edelgard as she truly is, and finds a woman to admire, maybe to love- and it doesn't hurt that Edelgard is so easy to tease, particularly for an old flirt like Dorothea.)

(Dorothea's only wonder is that Edelgard resists. She clearly wants her- is clearly into her- but she will not accept, she resists, she does not even begin to seek what she wants, but flees it. Dorothea finds herself wondering about that- about what must drive Edelgard, that she seems almost... scared, to accept Dorothea's attentions. Many have wanted Dorothea, but no one has ever wanted her and then actively fought against it, and it is a mystery Dorothea ponders often.)

Her teacher, even, grows to be her friend. She knows the other teachers off-hand- Hanneman, the Lion's teacher, is wise, though half his stories involve talking about his sister and her apparently enormous brood of children, and the other half are about his obsession with Agarthan technology, and his willingness to mess with it, even when it might explode in his face. Manuela, meanwhile, is, to put it politely, a Goddess-damned mess that walks like a woman; but Dorothea loves her, Dorothea treats her almost like her mother, and so Edelgard, who can deny Dorothea nothing, is multiple times roped into hauling Manuela's drunk ass home.

She thanked her, once. Then blew her nose on Edelgard's cape. Had anyone but Dorothea asked, Edelgard thinks she might have chucked them in the lake. As it was, Edelgard just sighed and scrubbed the cape clean, with the help of Hubert, who is apparently the world's greatest domestic housekeeper. The things you learned about people when you lived with them.

( Dorothea knows she's taking advantage when she asks Edelgard for help, but Edelgard is so strong... and Manuela partially raised Dorothea, was her guardian in the opera, when others would have taken advantage of the beautiful street rat. She owes a debt to Manuela that she will never be able to repay, and she is determined to take care of Manuela, to make up for the fact that Manuela seems equally determined to not take care of herself.)

Seteth, the combat instructor, is cold, but she senses great sorrow in him, and so Edelgard does not hold it against him. She knows that pain of loss, she bears it inside too. He seems to have a particular distaste for the Black Eagles, but she asks the others not to lash out because of it, and he eases up a few weeks in at Byleth's request. Someone in Adrestia did this man harm, Edelgard thinks, and so she is gentle when she speaks with him.

But Byleth... Byleth becomes a friend, to Edelgard's surprise. Maybe it's how close they are in age, or something else- maybe just shared knowledge of death. Byleth alone in the monastery might have seen as much death as Edelgard has, and the two share a connection only survivors know. Byleth, who only seems cold, who grows close to all of them, who intervenes directly with her students and seems determined to shepherd them through every storm.

Byleth, who Edelgard confides so much in, not entirely meaning to- but that blank face is one that prompts talk, if only out of nervousness. They all do it, they all speak to that blank stare, but Byleth proves worthy of the confidence, keeps all their secrets close to her chest- and supports them, understands.

Edelgard even wonders if, perhaps, she can share her suspicions with her, and get the mercenary's aid in hunting down whomsoever it was that decided Brigid should die.

Things are nice, for a few months. She even gets along with the other Houses, and in particular gets to know Claude, who is so incredibly smitten with Byleth that it is the only secret the man has that everyone knows; even Linhardt, who pays more attention to his pillow than anything else, sees it, and at one point writes an epic mock ballad about a Deer trying to fuck an Eagle that is so foul, crass, and rude that Dorothea immediately starts trying to set it to music.

That was the day Edelgard stopped wondering what Caspar saw in Linhardt.

( To his credit, Claude found it actually really funny, and suggested a choir for certain parts.)

Claude's a good man, if secretive. She gets that; his Almyran heritage is written all over his face, and the Alliance is a hotbed of intrigue that makes the Empire look well-adjusted. He's in a difficult position; she's heard that some kind of... fight has happened over there. Something about nobles disappearing, about his grandfather's weakness, rumors of experiments and strange things... but it's always hard to get news out of the Alliance, so she dismisses it. Probably just political intrigues gone wild. Claude is always working so closely with Hilda, who is so lazy and superficial that Edelgard doesn't pay much attention to her.

(That will bite her, in time.)

Only Dimitri bothers her, and it isn't anything the man's done, he's kind and gentle and heroic to a fault. It's that Dimitri is, well... her step brother.

Her real mother had died after giving birth to the last of her siblings; her father had remarried, and that woman had been Dimitri's mother, as it turned out. She'd tried to lead a coup or political movement of some sort against his uncle Rufus, and had been banished from Faerghus, her marriage to the king annulled. Edelgard had found all this out while hunting down what info she could about her family, looking for any connection to her dead she had left.

This had all happened when Dimitri was still a baby, and he had been raised by another woman since, a Cornelia... something. He calls that woman Mother, she's heard him do it, and from all she's heard, that's more or less how he sees it. The same way Patricia was her mother, because she'd been a child when her father remarried, and she remembers Patricia's warm, kind smile. A stepmother can be your mom, that is a truth Edelgard knows well, and Dimtri does, too.

But Edelgard has no true relation to him, not really. He is her step brother only in the most incredibly distant sense. On a technicality and a whim, really.

But... she would like to call him brother. It would be nice, to have a sibling who lived, even a sibling who wasn't really a sibling, in the end. A fantasy, but... the kind that makes life a little easier.

Before she can try, though, before her aching tongue can say the words that will soothe it, the Tomb of the Goddess happens, and all hell breaks loose.

-

A war on masked soldiers. Faces decorated with dragons- dragons! Ever since Seiros' horrific assault on humanity, dragons have been the bogeyman of the world, Fodlan's great terror. Dragons, who followed Seiros, who once said, “ I will not bow to an ape.” Dragons, who rose up after Sothis' death, who followed Seiros in a reign of monsters ended only by the efforts of great heroes.

Dragons, who corrupted humans with their unholy blood, who gave Crests to humans in an effort to control them, and to empower their sycophantic servants. Some few manaketes opposed their brethren, but their stories are rare on the ground; dragons are figures of terror in most tales, who rose to take over after the Goddess' death.

The stories disagree as to why they rose up. Humans and dragons had lived in peace for years beforehand; but Sothis' death broke something open. The Dragons blamed humans for Sothis' death, and perhaps that is true; the Church maintains that it does not matter, that Agartha did not deserve the terrible vengeance wrecked on it, even if a human had slain her. Popular theories abound that the Dragons did it, or that Sothis died of natural causes and Seiros simply took an opportunity. Who is to say?

But here, now... men in dragon masks. Goddess. Edelgard feels revulsion, even as she cuts them down, as they race desperately to battle, to stop these men from doing whatever it is they came here to do, that requires them to break into Sothis' very tomb.

And the man with the enemy! Riding a great wyvern, bedecked in black, axe in hand. Chuckling and referring to them as “humans.” Clearly a put-on. Dragons have been dead for centuries... but she did hear a rumor, of dragons who could wear human form. Manaketes... but that would mean they could be anyone, they could be anywhere...

(Even in Brigid, a ghost whispers in her ear, a ghost wearing her mother's face, a man with that mask was in Brigid, remember)

Edelgard fights, and it is Linhardt who takes on the wyvern rider, the Dragon Knight- Linhardt had noticed that he flew a wyvern, and the wind magic in his veins knew how to put down a flying beast. Sacred Excalibur, and the Dragon Knight is hurt- though not dead. Laughing, and leaving them with a single shining stone, a gift for victories.

What the hell was going on? This is something of ancient tales, not modern combat, Edelgard has time to think.

Even as the Dragon Knight left, another strange being appeared nearby. A masked being before them, riding a masked wyvern, who halts the fight with words alone. The voice is distorted, not man or woman, made into a low growl, like the crackle of distant thunder.

“ I would rather not fight you. I have grander goals than this. And you have impressed my Dragon Knight... that's not easy, you know. He's quite hard to overawe.”

“ Who are you?” Byleth asks, the Sword of the Creator in her hands, taken from the masked mage who had tried to open the casket in the chaos of Linhardt's great victory.

“ I am the Storm Caller. And I bring the winds of change.”

Somewhere in Edelgard's bones, she finds it in herself to be afraid of that voice.

(Masked soldiers, masked men, remember, remember, the ghosts whisper, tone rising, now they scream it, remember REMEMBER **REMEMBER)**

A memory from so long ago, and a task the dead have set her.

“ Are you the one behind Brigid?!?” Edelgard yells, and the figure's posture changes; pauses; she has surprised this being, whatever and whoever it is.

But it leaves before it can speak again, leaving Edelgard with questions... but also, a goal.

She knows who is responsible for Brigid now.

(**KILL HIM EDELGARD, KILL HIM!**)

-

The silent, shadow war continues, even as the school year wears on. Masked men, and so much horror- and Remire, Goddess, Remire. _Remire_.

Memories of Brigid cloud Edelgard's mind, and she goes as berserk as the townsfolk, who slaughter each other with glee... who, who _change_, who form strange claws, who almost become dragons. What is this? Something poisonous in their blood... and the Dragon Knight appears again, amused by the massacre.

(**KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM!**)

And... a figure. Name of Rhea, strange, cold, cruel, amused. Who hates Byleth, who calls her abomination and blasphemy.

(**KILL THEM ALL KILL THEM ALL!**)

Edelgard barely pays attention, too furious, too taken by bloodlust, too desperate to silence the screaming ghosts... though even in her berserk rage she does not strike down the villagers who are still sane, and even manages to save someone. In one of the small houses, there had been a strange, green-haired girl. She had lain there hurt, but hadn't been possessed like the others, and Edelgard had picked her up and put her unconscious form over one shoulder without thinking, still fighting even with that handicap, moving to defend the girl. She can save one person, even if she could not save her family.

(we're dying Edelgard why can you not save us **SAVE US EDELGARD AVENGE US**)

The Dragon Knight had come for her when he saw that. Probably zeroing in on easy prey, though the sudden seriousness of his movements speaks of something else... but Linhardt proves his victor again, and the Dragon Knight isn't laughing when Linhardt pummels him this time. He is furious, but Linhardt- sleepy, wise Linhardt, who hates fighting- proves himself the one Eagle who can face this foe, and his wings are strong enough to blow this hurricane back where it came from. The Dragon Knight is banished, and the battle ends soon enough, those villagers still sane enough to be rescued fleeing, and their poor brethren, who are innocent of this, who are guilty only of being victims of Rhea's cruelty, are put down, the only mercy the Eagles know how to give them.

It is a bloody and horrific day, and there are no celebrations and no joy in them after this battle, not even in Caspar's heart.

-

Without the roar of battle to distract her, Edelgard collapses, holding the girl, victim and prey for her ghosts... until Dorothea comes up to her, hugs her gently, hums a soft, wordless tune that calls Edelgard back from the brink, and makes her ghosts go silent at last.

She is so ashamed that she cannot even thank Dorothea, just flees her arms, avoids her, and when they return to Garreg Mach, Edelgard runs to her room, to weep into her bed, to try to stay awake as long as she can before sleep submerges her in horrific nightmares that Petra must shake her awake from.

But before she wakes her up, Petra goes to the opera singer, and she tells Dorothea why Edelgard acts this way, tells all the Emperor's secrets to the commoner.

A violation of trust, but Petra must do something, Edelgard is getting worse and worse as the war on the Storm Caller goes on. Too many bad memories, and what healing she has received isn't enough to suffer this new wound... and Edelgard needs support. The only help for pains like this are people who care about you, and Dorothea cares enough that Petra trusts her with this knowledge. The Eagles can help Edelgard- they cannot save her, but they can give her the strength to save herself, they can be there for her on good days and bad.

Dorothea thanks Petra, knows what it costs the silent Brigidian warrior to betray Edelgard like this, and swears to do her best to help her. She gets the others to help, too, not by betraying Petra's trust, but by reminding them of debts they owe the Emperor, and tells them only that Edelgard was hurt bad by Remire, hurt on the inside.

Over the next week, Edelgard's nightmares recede like a tide of blood, under the careful- and carefully orchestrated- attentions of her fellow Eagles, the flock moving as one to protect her from her inner demons. Even Caspar, impossibly, finds it in him to be gentle, playing strategy games with her, something like the battle they both so love but removed enough that it does not trigger her rampages. Hubert makes sure her clothes are clean, Petra keeps all Imperial business at bay for a time, Linhardt casts spells of peace on her (with her consent, and in full confidentiality), and Bernie joins her in taking care of the animals.

Byleth takes her fishing, because the professor only has four things she likes; she has already been banned from fighting Edelgard, you can only eat so often in a day, and sleeping isn't a group activity, so that leaves fishing. She gives Edelgard an extremely stupid looking hat, puts on one herself, and the two spend the day trying to murder the fish in the lake very slowly. Claude apparently bought Byleth the hats, and they discuss him a little, discuss that Byleth is surprisingly touched by his interest, though she views him as a bit young for her to pursue.

Still, it's... flattering. Byleth has put off so many people with her stoic nature before; it is nice to be, if not chased, at least wanted, for the first time.

An hour or so into it, Flayn, who joins the Black Eagles at the monastery for lack of elsewhere to go, fishes with them too, and her eyes are haunted veteran's eyes- probably related to the scars all over her torso, she has wounds that should have killed her. Flayn catches twice the fish the others do, and makes an amazing meal with them that Edelgard does not have the heart to tell her she can't taste. Her tongue has been numb in her mouth since the Tragedy of Brigid, though Byleth assures her that the meal is beyond fantastic. Flayn just grins, and mentions that an old friend taught her, and gives her erstwhile fishing buddies stories of how bad she used to be at cooking, before her father took the matter in hand.

It helps, it all helps, and Edelgard will never piece together why all these people think she is worth the attention- though she will accept it. It grants her too much peace not to.

(She is worth it because she is their friend, and because- though she does not know it- the mask she wears is not just a mask, but another facet of herself. She is not just the berserker; she is also the kind woman they have come to know. A person is a complicated thing.)

-

Edelgard sits outside the Goddess Tower, and it is Dorothea who meets her there. Edelgard tells her the story of her parents, a fantasy she must believe in- it's probably not true, but Edelgard likes to think it is, it makes her feel connected to her long-dead parents, to think they met and it was beautiful as a fairy tale.

Dorothea meeting her here almost sends her into flight, but this has been a good day, and so she stays, and hears Dorothea sing, just for her- a reward, Dorothea tells her, for telling her such a lovely story.

Edelgard's face burns with fire as the song finishes. It is the loveliest thing she has ever heard, and she does not quite mean to cry, but weep a little she does, and thanks Dorothea for her kindness. The singer merely laughs, blows her a kiss, and leaves Edelgard stewing in a rush of her own desires and wants.

(Edelgard could bury herself in Dorothea, and bury her past, all her pain- soon, she swears to herself. The Storm Caller must be killed first, Remire avenged, all the dead made whole. And then... then she can love. Then she can live. But not before. That's her promise to herself. Avenge the dead, then you can live.)

-

Jeralt is murdered by a traitor's arrow. A trick. They had thought themselves so smart, following wounded Hanneman's trail to the Dragon Knight's lair, to rescue a Knight of the Spirit trapped down there for a year, Linhardt making their now-personal war a matter of three and zero, even though he takes a nasty blow from a hatchet first.

Edelgard had felt almost... heroic. She'd been having a good day, and even seeing the Storm Caller does not dull that joy in her heart; she even laughs when Ferdinand mocks the Storm Caller, calls him the Storm Runner for fleeing.

It was a good day.

But now... oh Byleth, oh, Professor. Shamir, that had been the devil's name, she had struck him down from behind like a coward, an arrow to his heart. The greatest warrior, the mightiest Knight of the Spirit, taken down by a cheap shot.

Edelgard swears vengeance. One more ghost to avenge. One more. For her friend; and Byleth, her professor, is her friend, no question. Her pain becomes Edelgard's pain, and Edelgard is so used to suffering, what's a little more?

Even the other Houses get involved in the grieving. Claude plants flowers on the grave- of course he does. Claude's crush on Byleth is the worst-kept of the man's secrets, and this must cut him to the bone.

(She is right for reasons she cannot imagine, not at that moment.)

Dedue takes care to cook meals for Byleth, and deliver them- the professor has always been lax about her eating habits, and with her father's death, what was once stoicism is now withdrawal. Bernadette, of all people, who knows despair better than anyone except, perhaps, Marianne, ends up sitting with her, not talking, just sitting. They all rotate that duty, watching their teacher, and a week later she finally arises, and begins to go through the motions of life again.

But Edelgard knows that suffering, talks to her about it- about revenge- and so, when Rhea reveals herself, when Byleth has a chance to gut Shamir, Edelgard backs her up, and the Eagles go with her.

-

Shamir stands, confident, smiling as Rhea walks up behind her.

“ Ah, Shamir. Human, but a magnificent servant. So faithful. So loyal.”

Shamir preens. Rhea's face turns inhuman, eyes slitting.

“ But just a human.”

Rhea's hand goes through Shamir's back, and pulls her heart out. Shamir collapses, dying, and Rhea holds the heart up.

“ Be banished into the brilliant light of dragonfire, unholy abomination,” she commands, and the heart bursts into white fire, and Byleth is taken away in a flash of solar fury.

_No_.

Edelgard loses herself. Scores of masked soldiers fall. The Eagles race along, desperate to protect their leader as she gives in to the bloodlust that lurks inside.

(they killed Byleth they killed professor they killed me Edelgard kill them KILL THEM **KILL THEM**)

She does not remember most of what comes next- of Rhea escaping, of Byleth returned, hair rendered strange by whatever happened to her in that light- but she does remember Dorothea hugging her from behind, she remembers settling back against Dorothea's softness, she remembers waking up afterwards, and talking with Solon of what this all might mean.

-

Answers are found in the wake of Jeralt's death and Byleth's transformation. Byleth has told them the truth; that Sothis, not-quite-dead, had been possessing her, though she does not know why, nor does she know why she has the strange powers she does. Her father's journal revealed that Solon did something to her to try to revive the Goddess, that Byleth is not entirely natural, but what ancient texts call a homunculus- a being made of dark magic. She is a shadow given life and then stuffed with the ghost of a divine dragon; there is nothing like Byleth in all the world.

But she's still a person. Edelgard tells her so, stands up when Byleth seems down on herself, and her and the Eagles all voice their support of her. Flayn's eyes light up with... interest? Something there, something about being told she's a person, that she wants, though Edelgard has no time to piece that together, as Byleth thanks them, and even smiles, the first time she's seen a true smile on her teacher's face.

And then the last battle is upon them.

-

The final battle is another tomb, but this one a museum of oddities; the last pieces of Agartha in Garreg Mach, the last relics of mankind's greatness, which the Church of the Spirit seeks to bring mankind back to again.

The Storm Caller seeks to take this Agarthan technology, so now comes last battles; now comes the Storm Caller and their soldiers against the Black Eagles, one last showdown. Edelgard is proud to stand with her Eagles, who defend this place of humanity's history from these dragon cultists as if it were their very roost, they spread their wings and fly, and she has never been so proud of them.

They win a hard-fought victory, and at the last moment, Edelgard corners the Storm Caller- the one who has murdered so many, who is responsible for all her suffering- and she flings Aymr at the mask.

The mask shatters under that perfect throw, and somehow, Edelgard _knew _who it was, the moment before it came off, she is filled with understanding sudden and terrible as the shards fall off and the truth is revealed at last.

“ I suppose,” Claude said, sighing as he wipes a thin trail of blood from his face, “ that this was inevitable.”

No.

-

Garreg Mach is under attack by the Alliance, which needs hide itself no longer, and dragons come with them.

Dragons, _dragons_, Claude is not just a schemer or a planner, he is a demon of hell, Adrestia never cared too much for the Church's strictures but Edelgard _knows _what dragons mean, what they tried to do to mankind so long ago, before Nemesis arose and put an end to the ambitions of inhuman monsters. The King of Liberation, once a bandit, then Emperor of Adrestia, her own noble ancestor, through whose line she inherits her Crest of Flames- whose blood in her veins pumps with understanding and purpose and _terror _as she sees his old enemies arise again.

Dragons. Claude has cut a deal with dragons.

Panic crawls all over her as she sees the beasts arise and, with a few puffs of their deadly breath, clear a row of men, dozens of good men and infantry bursting into ashes at a touch. Oh Spirit, no, no no no _no_-

Her thoughts are a mess, even as she swings Aymr, even as she stands and fights and casts spells, Byleth a blazing icon of divine fury beside her. She is grateful for that, Claude has demons on his side but they've got the Goddess Herself, or whatever it is that Byleth is, and maybe that outweighs it, in the end. This is a war between Heaven and Hell, and she is but a human, Crest or no Crest, but she fights anyway.

_This can't be happening, this can't be real_

Dimitri fights too, Spirit bless her crazy brother, him and Dedue form an iron wall as the Alliance troops storm the ones made of stone, the Blue Lions fight beside her Black Eagles, desperate to hold back the storm. And storm it is, a crimson wind that will take them all; even as she cuts down three men, ten more rise to take their place, and all manner of unholy demon come with them. A dragon approaches, a dragon, Spirit within, _dragons walk the earth again_...

Her nightmares and reality blend and bleed together. The dead of Brigid lay piled up next to Alliance corpses, she sees a dragon swoop down on Brigid's capital and set it alight. Hilda directs the titanic forces at her command with swift, sure movements- Hilda, dear Goddess, _Hilda_, she jokes about being lazy, how has she turned into this calm, cold, cruel general? Edelgard _knew _her, she wasn't like this... was she?

What a fool she's been. She's been wrong about... about everything. These people aren't her friends. They're her enemies. She's... she's so stupid, she's always been wrong, everyone betrays her. Her family betrays her by dying, her country betrays her by murdering Petra's people for it, and now her friends betray her by hiding their true nature and seeking her death.

Of course. She is alone, the way she always is.

Her mind shatters. Fractures were always there, slowly healing... but she has not had enough time to truly recover. She stands on cracked glass, and the sight of dragons is a hammer blow to it- and Edelgard falls.

Mad laughter begins to spill from her lips. Her mind starts to shut down. Her arms are tired and her spells are getting sloppy, but still she keeps going, berserker inertia the only thing keeping the machine called Edelgard alive, dead inside even as she sows more physical death all around her.

She laughs.

The Archbishop appears, and does... something. Some ancient technology, reserved for desperate moments, called forth by gutting an enemy soldier and pulling his heart out- not something she would have expected him capable of, but today is a day for Edelgard to find out how foolish she truly is, how wrong she is, and her only outward reaction to the sight is another burst of bloodthirsty laughter.

Solon casts a spell with that heart that swallows half the battlefield in darkness, a sacred banishment to Zaharas, granting a moment's reprieve before cruel claws close over him, some immaculate dragon swooping in to catch and drag him alive and screaming to a cage, the old wizard bound and helpless as he is taken by Alliance forces. Byleth tries to save him- and fails. She falls.

_NO! NO!_

Tears pour from Edelgard's eyes as her professor falls over the cliff, down into death and darkness. Howls of denial tear from her lips, but she keeps fighting, she can do nothing else- until she sees Claude.

She sees him take aim at Dimitri, at her brother, at the last person on the planet who she will ever be able to call kin.

Flashes of Petra, of little Petra, and Edelgard before the axes of her countrymen, blazing through her eyes. Her dead parents, her dead siblings.

_No!_

She leaps and shoves Dimitri out of the way. Claude's arrow takes her left eye and all her sanity with it.


	2. How We Grew Up

**HOW WE GREW UP**

Edelgard will never remember how she escaped Garreg Mach alive. Other survivors will tell stories of a one-eyed berserker, screaming to the high heavens, defending Dimitri even as she bled from her ruined eye, how she threw spells and swung her axe with equal aplomb.

Some will report that she eventually fell, and that Petra saved her, as she had once saved Petra, the Brigid exile dashing to the fallen princess' side and hauling her out bodily, a feat of heroics, to repay her for her kindness of years before.

She did not get Aymr, no one knows where her ancestral weapon went, but she got Edelgard.

Petra is hurt, but she is able to pass Edelgard's unconscious form to the other Black Eagles first, before she distracts the enemy with a chase- a chase that ends with her plummeting into a river, thought to be dead.

Edelgard will remember nothing of that day, and very little of the next week. Her nights are unblemished storms of nightmares; her days differ only in that, when she is awake, she cannot see out of her left eye. The others take care of her as best they can, and their care and love for her, that she recalls in hallucinogenic flashes that are hard to tell apart from the dreams. She recalls Caspar's desperate face, she recalls Dorothea stroking her hair one late night when the nightmares won't stop, she recalls Linhardt tending to her eye. She recalls Hubert, ever-present, who maintains her and feeds her, and the murmurs of quiet conversation... and Petra's name on every tongue, sorrowful tones and loss.

-

In another time and place, Dorothea is forced to fight a war of aggression; she is made one of Edelgard's foremost and most trusted officers, and she commands death in a war provoked by nothing more than Edelgard's dream. It destroys her, to become a destroyer; and the war's torment is clear in her eyes.

But in this time and place, war has come for _her_, she is innocent of responsibility here, none of the bloodshed is her fault, and that means she turns out differently. To be attacked, to be hunted, is something Dorothea is intimately familiar with, from her days as a street rat; she knows how to scurry, how to hide, to listen to her hackles when they rise. Too much like the bad old days, and the war wears on her; but it is still familiar, and she is not wounded by visions of her dead schoolmates and friends. It was not her choice or decision to fight them, after all; she seeks only to defend herself and her home, and self-defense is one of the only good reasons to fight in all the world, you have a right and a duty to protect yourself.

A spirit of _defiance_, the same unbreakable strength of will that let Dorothea survive the streets of Enbarr, comes back to her, a fire that had never died but merely slept during times of plenty, kept stoked in case of need; and now that the need arises, she finds she is a towering inferno, she finds that she will not back down, even standing up at the gates of Hell, with dragons alive again.

Dorothea rises to the impossible challenge even as the rest begin to fall, and she halts their collapse single-handedly. Where Caspar would give in to rage, Dorothea slaps him back to focus; where Linhardt would give up to despair, Dorothea hugs him, gives him strength to push through. Bernadette's fears are assuaged by Dorothea's attentions, the scaredy-cat convinced that she is an Eagle and that her place is with them. Ferdinand's bravado is reined it before it can get him killed; Hubert is forced to share secrets he would never reveal by the sheer force of Dorothea's personality and the need to keep Edelgard safe. Edelgard, who wanders in a daze while awake and whimpers in her sleep, kept safe by Dorothea, who wonders if the woman inside will ever come back out.

Irony of ironies, only Raphael, Annette, and Flayn, their transferred folk, their take-ins, need no assistance from Dorothea. Raphael is laser-focused on survival, on living long enough to see his sister again, Annette saw her father fall at Garreg Mach, she is driven by revenge and her functioning is at a peak, and Flayn is an old veteran, she has seen more war and death than anyone here, now that they no longer have Byleth and Edelgard wanders only the nightmare of her own mind.

They become some of her most trusted lieutenants, not Deer or Lion or stranger any longer, but Black Eagles, they put on new wings and they fly, supporting Dorothea in the lead of her refugee flock.

And so it is that, bereft of Edelgard and Petra both, the Black Eagles are not left leaderless; and it is Dorothea who marches her group of refugees to something like safety, for a time.

-

Edelgard spends a week in a haze. She only truly awakes when battle finds them, when the Black Eagles- who are now fugitives, each are wanted in their own home country, these teenagers wanted dead or alive before they even truly hit adulthood- are caught. The sound of war _awakens_ her, some glorious surge of howling rage that clears her head, the ghosts drowned in a tide of bloodlust.

Losing her eye has shattered some barrier inside her, some restraint has popped loose; and now Edelgard is freed to be the screaming berserker she always was. And yet it is strangely... calm... the fire is dead inside. There are only ashes left, and it leaves Edelgard terrifyingly calm, even as the ashes inside her seek to smother all she encounters.

She storms out of the makeshift hospital tent they'd set up and charges the battlefield, armorless, one of Caspar's axes in hand, and fire dances around her as her spells murder the foe. She demolishes the enemy, the bloodline of Nemesis awakens in her so strong that nothing can stand up to her, and not a sound comes from her lips; she is perfectly calm, she is more at peace than she has ever been before. The ashes inside her smother her soul and her enemies both.

As she is soaked in gore, the dead leave her be, driven back by the wave of newly dead that she creates.

It is only when the battle is over that her head fogs again, that the nightmares return; and she meekly lets Dorothea return her to camp, to be cleaned and tended to.

But somewhere inside, the ashes begin to spread, and all the bright fire of her begins to die.

-

They are cornered by an army of men and dragons, a week out, an army big enough that all their incredible talent and Edelgard's quiet fury cannot win the day. The end is come, and they know it; they cannot fight an army entire.

They are surprised by the attack, because Claude has recognized that Edelgard is his true enemy, that she will never seek peace with him; and so he hounds them relentlessly, has prepared ambushes all over, and they have stumbled into one.

But there is someone with them that even Claude, hunter of secrets, could not have predicted; something that one of his allies has conspicuously failed to tell him about. The Dragon Knight is loyal to Rhea's dream, and thus, is subservient to Claude, but he has goals of his own, and he did not tell them of the green-haired girl, or her true power.

So when the army finds them, Flayn stands up, with a strange look on her face.

“ You're my friends, you know,” she says. In the last few months of their stay at Garreg Mach, Flayn- who they all know by instinct is not really a teenager, no matter how young she looks- had become a Black Eagle and joined them, and they had all gotten to know the quiet, sweet girl-who-was-not-a-girl. “ So... please... remember me that way.”

And from her pocket, she withdrew a shining gem, and she _changed_.

She is a massive leviathan in her true form, a dragon of the waters; a great sea serpent, something like an oarfish and a carp put together. She can move on land, if awkwardly, powerful fins working as something like legs, but the real value of her immense form is the surprise the enemy feels and the power of her watery breath, which releases a flood of newly-formed freshwater that washes the army away and renders the ground soggy and muddy, difficult to cross on foot and almost impossible for cavalry and caravans to move over. Not perfect, but it gives them a chance to put distance between them and their pursuers, possibly to lose them in the mountainous foothills of north-western Adrestia.

The dragons can just fly over it, and they do so, desperate to keep them from escaping- but it turns out that the old stories tell the truth: dragons can be slain. Dorothea and her friends are used to killing monsters, and at her able direction they distract, confuse, and befuddle the beast long enough for Caspar to get a killing blow across its over-extended throat, while Flayn and Edelgard battle the other, Flayn finishing it by tearing its head off with her massive, toothless jaws as Edelgard distracts it by setting its wings alight.

The enemy tries to approach, but they escape, Flayn shifting back to human and collapsing from her exertions. Edelgard carries her, setting her feet to running, and though the chase takes all day, the Black Eagles manage to shake them off their trail. Edelgard stays awake, even helps them set up the tents and get firewood, the sight of dragons spreading the ashes inside her and dampening all of her fires, though all of them look at her askance- it's the longest consistent period in which she's been up and moving since she lost her eye. She even thanks Hubert for making her an eyepatch, which visibly disturbs the stoic man more than seeing her wounded did. She's too... calm.

Flayn lays near their fire, sleeping, covered in a few warm blankets. She awakes in the safety of their small camp, near their fire, late that night, slowly rising to a sitting position.

“ I... I'm sure you have... questions,” she manages. Edelgard lades a portion of their meager stew- and thank the Goddess they have food at all, Caspar and Hubert had been prepared out of paranoia and habit respectively- into a bowl, and brings it to her.

“ Just one,” Edelgard says, and Flayn, who is very old, has time to be disturbed by the simple emptiness in her eyes and her voice, at peace only because there was nothing inside her left to burn.

“ W-what?” Flayn asks, as she sips from the bowl.

“ Are you still one of my Eagles?” Edelgard asks. Flayn, who had expected to be thrown out- and how can she blame them? After everything her people have done, how can she blame these humans their fear?- isn't sure how to answer that, for a second.

“ Would you have me?” Flayn replies. Edelgard nods.

“ I need loyal soldiers to throw out the invaders, and I do not care if they are humans or dragons,” Edelgard answers. “ The tribe of Saint Cethleann fought alongside my ancestor. I offer that same chance to you.”

Flayn barks a laugh. “ I know that, and better than you, descendant of Nemesis. Once upon a time, I had the name my father gave me... and it was Cethleann.”

The others are caught in open shock. Cethleann, sacred dragon, the only Saint who was not one of the Ten Elites of Nemesis- the only saint to be a dragon, sacred beast of water that sought only to stop Seiros.

If Flayn is Cethlean, than she predates even Adrestia, she is ancient beyond belief... Dorothea, who loves faith, revels in it, seems almost entranced, as does Ferdinand, while their mages stare at each in shocked disbelief, Hubert and Linhardt both pondering just what it would mean, for Cethleann to walk among them again. The others are stuck in various states of disbelief.

Only Edelgard doesn't care. The past is a cemetery of demand-spewing ghosts, the future is a shallow grave. Only right now was real.

“ Will you fight, Cethleann?” Edelgard asks, and Cethleann, who never wanted any of this, whose morals drive her to fight even as her heart desires only to rest and eat, finds herself swearing allegiance to Nemesis' family twice in one life.

“ Until the day I die or Seiros does,” she promises, quietly and with a sense of sinking... but Edelgard's hug is as warm as it is surprising.

“ Thank you,” she says, and a little of the old Edelgard is in that voice.

And that night, Edelgard truly awakens- giving in to the onslaught of hate inside her, to chase her ghosts away, and to command the war.

(The only ghost that remains is Petra, as present in death as she was in life.)

-

Far away...

The river bears Petra safely a long distance- too long; there is some magic at work here, or, perhaps, the poor luck of Petra is being repaid all at once, in a bounty, in a jackpot. Petra is found, unconscious, but breathing, adrift on a tree trunk, by some of her countrymen, fishers and sailors, who dare come close enough to Fodlan's shores for the bounty to be found here.

When they see her- their exile, their most hated citizen, traitor to their kind- they debate what to do. To drown her seems a way to fix the mistake, to end the shame of Brigid's royal family, who serves the Empire that murdered Brigid... but, in another burst of good luck, the captain mentions a cousin, who is alive because Petra saved him, months ago.

And that turns the discussion another way, turns it around. For in the middle of the hunt for the Dragon Knight, Petra had received word of pirates attacking what was left of Brigid, and Edelgard, who could never stomach harm being done to the remnants of that place, had ordered the Black Eagles to go assist. The pirates were crushed, and the Eagles had flown back to the mission, to discover the Dragon Knight under Garreg Mach and retrieve the woman who would kill Jeralt, though they knew it not at the time. Edelgard had damn near forgotten about it, afterwards.

A simple act of atonement, of reparation, for all the things Adrestia has done to Brigid. Not even close to being enough. But... it is something. It is something to think about. And they know that only Petra would be able to convince Edelgard to do this, and that makes the sailors think, even as they look at her unconscious form in the water.

Perhaps, they say to themselves, she is no traitor at all. Perhaps Petra has been doing the duty of royalty all this time- has been working for the only victory she can, siding with Edelgard in hopes that, when Edelgard takes the throne, she can restore Brigid.

And the idea carries some weight, because of the Eagles, because of what they did for Brigid. They said Edelgard saved Petra during the Tragedy, something no one in Brigid had ever believed up until a few months ago, when Edelgard and her army had arrived, and driven the pirates from their shores. It had seemed an excuse for Petra, a way for her to blame a life debt... but now they know several folk of Brigid who owe their lives to Edelgard, and it does not seem such a stretch that Edelgard might have rescued one more, in her youth.

There are no kind words for Adrestians in Brigid, but a few lips have offered praise for Edelgard, in recent times, and some wonder now if perhaps the old myth is true, if Petra is repaying a life debt to Edelgard, who rescued her from her countrymen's blades. If Petra seeks to make Adrestia repay all of its old debts, if Edelgard, for whom Brigid was murdered, may in fact be innocent of the crimes of her countrymen, if perhaps she genuinely seeks to atone.

The people of Brigid will never forgive Adrestia. Some things are beyond the pale. But this group of sailors, finding their far-flung princess in need, find that they can forgive _Edelgard_, that they can forgive _Petra_. Who knows the games of politics? If Edelgard can retake her throne, with the help of Brigid's estranged princess, perhaps there can be reparations, there can be hope for Brigid after all. Perhaps Petra can return one day, dishonored no more, and Brigid can be rebuilt; and the Tragedy's long nightmare might finally be over at last.

Others would not think so, perhaps. But there is the thought, in Brigid, of late, that they have judged too harshly, perhaps, that they have... made a mistake. That they have made assumptions which have proven false, been too quick to cast aspersions, now that Petra has shown herself to still be a defender of her people. And while many in Brigid refuse to do so, this group is not above admitting such, and that is another streak of luck that Petra is owed, paid to her honestly and in full.

So they pull her alive out of the water and patch up their fallen princess, and when she awakens, she sees the friendly faces of her countrymen, and knows she is safe.

And when she is healed, she leaves them, to set off to find Edelgard, in the middle of Fodlan's great war, and finish repaying her debt.

-

For the next five years, Edelgard goes to war, and leaves a storm of ashes in her wake.

For five years across her stolen country, even as Adrestian flags are burned in great pyres and the flags of the Alliance raised in their place, as dragons murder all resistance and erect churches to their glory in a hundred cities, Edelgard marches; Dorothea at her side, her second-in-command, who can translate Edelgard's growling into plans for the rest of them, who keeps her head in combat because Edelgard does not. For all Edelgard's calm, once the battle is joined, she is too focused on the slaughter to command, and so any adjustments to the plan must come from the singer's lips.

Dorothea Arnualt, of no nobility, thus becomes the pillar on which the resistance hangs, even as Edelgard guides them to war against their oppressors; and victories they mount, where no one else can. Dragons are cut down in their sleep. Alliance officers are killed. Entire shipments of supplies, lost, translated into life and food and support for Edelgard's endless battle. The innocent are saved, bandits purged, hostages rescued, the Adrestian people protected.

Five long years, in which the Black Eagles, always hunted, always hounded, become legends to the people- their last great hope, the final resistance, the true Emperor and her faithful bodyguard, who someday will return to her throne and save them all. Their names become stories on every lip, even as the Alliance bans mention of them on pain of death; the insignia of the Black Eagles decorates a dozen walls in every town in Adrestia. What was once just an affectation of the officer's school in Garreg Mach now becomes a sacred symbol of resistance that inspires the people to rise up. Each develops a legend; Caspar Dragonslayer, Annette the Witch Knight, Wise Dorothea. Ferdinand the Lost, Merciful Linhardt, Red Raphael. Names of honor and respect, for the teenagers who spend five years at war in the name of their people, the only thing the grateful population can give them.

They grow tall, in the eyes of their people, and cast long shadows that haunt the nightmares of the Alliance officials, who live in fear of the day that the wings of Eagles carry them to the grave for their sins.

The Eagles inspire rebellion in people they will never meet. Grown men and women die shouting words of loyalty and long life to the Eagles, even as the executioner pulls the handle and they drop; children whisper excited and exaggerated stories of their heroics in playgrounds and forests away from watchful eyes. Flags of ancient Adrestia are carefully preserved under floorboards and in hidden places, awaiting the day that Edelgard comes home to Enbarr and the Empire is reborn at last; precious relics are protected, hidden, for the day that Edelgard will call and they must use them to take back their country.

There are few homes in Adrestia that do not pray to the Goddess to keep Edelgard and her Eagles safe. And those prayers are answered by someone; they live, they survive, they keep fighting and they keep winning small battles, even as the war always turns against them- but they are the only victories Adrestians earn at all, and so they are celebrated in secret and in every home.

For all Claude's brilliance, he cannot overcome this simple fact: the people love their Emperor. Before, that love had been born of simple loyalty to the family of Nemesis, sacred progenitor; but now that love is born from her deeds, from the impossible task she has committed herself to, and the good she has done.

The Eagles' heroics attract almost as many soldiers as they lose, volunteers who come to them to serve, knowing that death awaits them, but knowing, too, that there are things that matter more than death, that are worth a life. There are only four good reasons to fight, happiness and freedom and justice and self-defense, and in service to all these great ideals come heroes from all the nations of the earth. Adrestians, first and foremost, who cannot stomach life under a golden flag, but others, too: Alliance ex-patriots who cannot live with themselves as oppressors, Kingdom citizens who go to serve with them in hopes of defending their homeland from afar, warriors of Duscur who seek to put axe to the throat of the ancient enemy of humanity. And from farther afield come foreigners, who serve- mercenaries of Dagda paid in stolen gold, scattered souls of lost Brigid who come to help the Emperor who once helped them, Almyran wyvern riders who seek to redeem their nation's sins, and a few from even farther afield, from places so distant that Fodlan knows of them only by myth and rumor.

Even dragons serve alongside them, for it is known that a dragon fights alongside Edelgard, that Cethleann is returned to the Empire in its time of need. A few of Flayn's distant kin come to join them, those who look around themselves and realize that this cannot possibly be what Sothis wanted, and so abandon Seiros' mad campaign to join the rebellion. Not many, but a few, who come to them, who offer up the terrible power of the manaketes, in penance for what their brethren do. They are watched, but all prove loyal, and the tribe of Saint Cethleann returns to the earth.

It is this army, an army of all nations and all races, that finds itself serving under the banner of the old Empire, united as Black Eagles.

And the old Empire it is; the Alliance and the Church of Seiros overwhelm all opposition. The dragons are the trump card, but would not have sufficed by themselves; it is Claude himself, Claude on his distant throne, and the support of all Almyra, that makes the war unwinnable. Claude is too smart. Given the resources Edelgard has, Claude would have devised a way to cut all the way to Enbarr; with the resources he now has, the war is a game of chess where he has all the pieces, and the loss of the Red King is assured, no matter how Edelgard runs, no matter how many pawns die in desperation to keep her alive.

Still, she can keep up the game for a time. The Red King dances across the tiles, one step ahead. He has not caught her yet.

But she cannot stop him from winning the rest of the board. Alliance troops and Almyran wyverns and Seiros dragons rein triumphant over what had once been Adrestia. It is broken up, divided into a dozen territories and awarded to nobles Claude favors, mostly those who are related to the small group that had been his Golden Deer, whom Claude loves so deeply.

They go to war, too, those Golden Deer, but only Ignatz and Hilda ever bring them to battle, and the Black Eagles never have a chance to kill them. They come close just once, Edelgard and Hilda once dueled amidst the carnage, and the least daughter of Goneril proved a match for the once-Emperor, pink hair flying as she strove to cut her down. That fight had ended when Hilda landed a lucky blow on Edelgard's leg, crippling her, and when Hilda had made ready to put an end to the rebellion, a nameless Adrestian rebel had tackled her, saving Edelgard's life. And while Hilda had shortly thereafter torn the woman's head off with a single swing of her axe, it had given Caspar time enough to grab Edelgard and run, for Linhardt to save the leg, and for the Eagles to continue their war.

The war goes along those lines for five years, and all of them change. Caspar is at peace in combat, something in war wears well on him, as it does for Bernie, who finds it less stressful than dealing with her father, who embraces the terrible irony that her own father was so awful that war is a chance, impossibly, to _heal _from her trauma. A quiet, powerful woman emerges from the sheltered, scared girl she had once been, and she and Caspar become fond of one another, laughing folk in battle. Fearless Bear, they will call Bernie, to her own amusement, a name born when one of the Dagda with them mispronounces her name and it sticks. Fearless Bear, for Bernie, who is so anxious in social situations, almost seems to deliberately seek out war, riding her horse into the middle of horrific battle, more at ease with violence than with small talk.

( The other Eagle officers know of the chair, of the way her father raised her, and understand. It is not that Bernie does not fear battle; it is that she fears social situations _more_. You can approach courage backwards.)

Caspar Dragonslayer, who delights in the challenge of battle, who alone of the Eagles manages to solo a dragon in the full glory of its fury, finishing the epic clash with a stolen axe buried deep in the jugular of a flame dragon, who dies in stunned disbelief. They all kill dragons, the Eagles become experts at the act, but Caspar alone strode forth to duel one and came back victorious, tall as a giant.

Annette joins them in time, her fury crystallizes in her veins, becomes eternal, and so she celebrates each death she causes, shares in their delight in battle. Witch Knight they call her, and it fits; she cackles in battle, avenging her father with every spell.

Flayn, who has earned every epithet she will ever have already, is simply at peace now, perversely finds the war more familiar than the strange land of peace she had originally woken up in, and goes back to the ancient task of a soldier with a veteran's gusto. Peace had sat strangely on her war-torn mind, but this is so familiar, a thousand years later and she finds that war never changes, to her relief.

Dorothea thrives most of all, her determination and her cool head make her the true leader of the rebellion, for all that Edelgard is their decision-maker and icon. There is no one in the Black Eagles- and the small army they have gathered- who does not know that Dorothea is their boss, and she manages the tasks that had once been Petra's with incredible efficiency. Wise Dorothea, counsel to the Emperor, who the common folk know is one of them, and who is thus the most beloved of all the Eagles, becomes a character archetype in a million stories, the commoner who advises Emperors.

They blossom, a verdant flower on the battlefield, finding spring in carnage.

But not all of them grow well in the face of this crimson wind.

Hubert ages three decades in five years, losing his Petra before their romance had a chance to blossom, and losing Edelgard just as he was beginning to truly serve her; serve he still does, but this Edelgard bears little resemblance to the kind, awkward young woman he had come to know. This Edelgard is too cold, too quiet, for all that she is so polite and seems so refined; something is gone in her, and Hubert does not know how to bring it back. Dark Hubert, they call him, for the gloom that follows him.

Ferdinand sees it too, and does his best to support Edelgard even as he mourns himself; Ferdinand is haunted by his family's death. is father having been one of the last to openly resist the invaders. He'd been a corrupt man, but nevertheless he had proven courageous in his final moments. He'd died well... but he'd still died, and Ferdinand's hair grows long in mourning. Ferdinand the Lost, in popular myth, the nobleman who lost everything in the attack, standing in for every good noble of Adrestia who has suffered in this assault.

Raphael is haunted by a sister whose status he knows not, but he cannot leave he has duties here, and it turns the mirthful giant mournful, his eyes shadowed by horrors. It makes him more of a berserker than he ever was, that worry, and they call him Red Raphael for the blood he spills, his Alliance heritage making him more dangerous in the eyes of Adrestia than he honestly deserves. He commiserates with Linhardt, who the war tears apart on the inside, who regrets each drop of blood on his hands, who focuses on healing so that he may contribute in a way that will not leave him shuddering with nightmares for days on end. Merciful Linhardt, who eases his heart by healing, who makes an effort to heal wherever he goes, and by himself probably buys the Eagles more support than any; there is no Adrestian who does not know that, if you bring your sick to Linhardt, he will restore them, and so villages keep quiet about the Eagles being near, do not inform the authorities.

A reward of coin is nice, after all, but to know that your child will not die of illness is worth much more, and gratitude to Merciful Linhardt keeps more lips shut than even Dorothea, who is aware of the phenomenon, will ever know.

And as for Petra, on her lone flight... she keeps getting distracted, saving the innocent from oppressive hands, and so she becomes a legend too, a rumor of a ghost that once served Edelgard, who even now in death serves her Emperor. The quite alive Petra keeps moving, ever hunting the Eagles and ever failing to make contact, the two circling each other, circling, but never once touching.

And the story of this Brigid woman who saves them makes the people of Adrestia speak of the mistake they made, that it must have been some scheme of Seiros, to make them murder Brigid's people, and wonder if the Alliance's oppression is not simply retribution for their sins, and popular opinion begins to turn in favor of the islanders, who so far escape the war's wrath, who seem to be deliberately ignored by the forces now taking over their former overlords.

( Claude cannot bring himself to make a second Tragedy, knowing that his allies were responsible for the first sickens him to his bones. Claude is a monster- you cannot do the things he has done and claim decency- but he is a monster with rules, and it is what sets him apart from Seiros, whose dreams of dominion have no such boundaries.)

The war proceeds outside their lands, too. The Church of the Spirit of Man falls everywhere; everywhere, that is, but in holy Faerghus itself, the middle child of Fodlan's nations, who finds itself as the last man standing. But it is not doing well, for all that it has outlasted its competition; Faerghus is barely holding out, armies of knights and scores of mages from Fhirdiad's school of sorcery just barely enough to keep the relentless storm from dimming the silver moon of Faerghus once and for all. Dimitri's parents fall ill, and he is forced to become King before his time; and while Dimitri, through trickery and alliance, brings all he can to bear, it just barely results in a stalemate that he is slowly, but surely, losing. He is playing poker with a veteran gambler, and while Dimitri discovers a spirit of daring within him that keeps Claude on his toes, beginner's luck can carry you only so far.

The Black Eagles hear only the most distant and distorted rumors of what happens up there, mostly focused on those who were once the Blue Lions, now Dimitri's most faithful and trusted companions. They hear that Dedue and Dimitri were married, in a solemn ceremony that brings Duscur fully into the war; Dedue and his family were not important, but Duscur had wanted to help, and needs only the thinnest excuse to enter the war. Ships bearing dark-skinned soldiers arrive daily at Faerghus' docks, entire companies of axe-and-shield-wielding warriors who appear to aid the Kingdom in its time of need, as once Faerghus knights had stormed the beaches of Duscur to aid it.

They hear that Felix takes up magic and puts down the sword after his father's death, in honor of him, and turns out to be a greater mage than he ever was a swordsman, more his father's son than either of them had ever liked to admit. They hear that Ashe and Ingrid are knights without peer, and that they slay dragons the way lesser knights slay infantrymen, though that is marked with tragedy; Ingrid's husband, Glenn, Felix's brother, had died, and the Widow Knight is Ingrid's title now, her child with Glenn kept by her father while she goes to war to avenge him.

They hear that Faerghus has been digging up old archaeological sites in desperation, looking for some ancient edge of lost Shambhala that can be brought to bear on these new foes, seeking something that might yet turn aside the end that approaches them.

They doubt most of these, but the last they know to be true; they meet a group of them once, a pack of scholars led by Mercedes, disguised as traveling mercenaries. They sit and take tea with them after a chance meeting on the road, Lions and Eagles curious as to each other's fates in a world ruled by the Deer.

Edelgard joins them, but lets Dorothea lead, spending most of her time remembering tea with Byleth, and happier days at Garreg Mach. It had been a bad day, and cold Edelgard needed the warmth of those memories- and diplomacy was never her strong suit.

Dorothea, however, is perfectly polite, an excellent hostess, and she and Mercedes exchange what few pleasantries remain in them. The Lions are headed East, into the Alliance proper, a mission almost impossibly dangerous; Mercedes goes, because Adrestia had been her home once, and she feels a terrible hate in her, for what has been done to it, would save it if she can.

In another life, they would hunt each other; in this one, Dorothea and Mercedes hug, and remember better days at Garreg Mach, and when they wave their goodbyes, they both have tears in their eyes.

They are the last people from Garreg Mach to see Mercedes alive, save Hilda, who will kill her- but it is not the last they will hear from her; but that is a story that must wait three months to be told, and so Mercedes slips away into the darkness of history, walking down the long road to her grave.

Five years into the war, Edelgard makes the decision to go to the ruins of Garreg Mach, to fulfill a promise to the dead; and Dorothea signs off on it, because she remembers the promise, too, and there are no reports of enemies in the area. Just some bandits, easily wiped out, and they might pick up some loot from them.

And who knows? Maybe seeing the monastery will do Edelgard some good. Lot of good memories there.

-

Byleth is alive. Edelgard stumbles on her, and does not even know it; her ghosts do not bother her so much these days, mostly because she has tipped over the edge into an insanity that is much colder, but Petra is a constant presence, and it does not surprise her that returning to Garreg Mach should cause her old professor to join her old retainer. She grins at Byleth's attempts to talk, chats with her amiably while ignoring her attempts to speak in return.

“ Quit that,” Edelgard snaps at her eventually, “ I know you're dead, stop trying to convince me otherwise. Be like Petra. She doesn't bother me so.”

Byleth, seeing that Edelgard is gone, seeing nothing in her eyes but empty, ash-choked wilderness, resolves only to follow her old student, keep her out of trouble. Maybe figure out how to fix all this... later.

There are bandits in the ruins, as Dorothea had known. Edelgard had cut ahead, eager to see the place, some small spark of the person she used to be daring to light itself up in her icy heart; seeing the bandits freezes her again, reminds her that she is a schoolgirl no longer, that more than her left eye was lost here.

She cannot claim her innocence was taken- that happened in Brigid, with Petra trembling in her arms, her own noblemen seeking to murder the girl for nothing more than her place of birth- but there had been... there had been almost a renaissance here, a new spring, some second blossoming of her broken heart that was cut short by the Storm Caller and all that came after. Without him, she thinks, she might have...

But that doesn't matter. That chance died with the professor, who walks beside her- but Byleth's boots crunch so loudly against the ground, is that normal? Petra is not so loud, but then again, Petra was never that loud, too much a hunter to be caught out like that.

But none of her other ghosts ever made such... normal sounds. Their voices were so loud, but their bodies passed through the world without disturbing it.

Edelgard wonders about that, and the spark in her refuses to die, Byleth's presence is like someone blowing gently on that delicate ember in her soul. Some echo of what once was, of better times, that inspires her to... remember.

She doesn't want to remember. If she remembers, then she'll have to look back on these last five years and.. she cannot live with the pain. With the loss. It's not guilt- she feels no real guilt for anything she's done, her Eagles have kept her righteous through her cold insanity, and that is a debt she will owe her friends all her life- but she must call them Eagles, and not her friends. She must suppress everything that she is. If she doesn't, the ghosts will come back. They'll tear her apart, for ignoring them for five years.

But that spark is so warm, and Edelgard is so cold.

She attacks the bandits to put out that fire in herself. Byleth moves with her, and Edelgard realizes this is not a dream- Byleth cuts them down, too, the Sword of the Creator a sacred whip that scourges the evil, slicing through bone and flesh. Her madness has never pretended her ghosts could touch the world.

Edelgard is stopped still by that. A miracle. The spark flares, threatens to catch her alight. Her professor returned to her- their luck might be turning around-

She chokes that hope in her heart. Hope hurts. If she lets herself feel, she'll break, she'll... she _can't_.

She turns to the battle with renewed ferocity, desperate to bury the joy that threatens to bring spring to her winter-bound heart, and with it, a flood of tears.

The Eagles catch up soon enough, each awestruck at seeing their professor- Byleth, shining, fighting, Sothis reborn. Cheers go up in the ranks, even amongst the broken in their company- even Hubert and Linhardt, who the war hurts worse than any, have smiles on their somber faces, cannot quite believe what they are seeing.

The bandits are routed soon enough. The Eagles would have been enough; Byleth added to the weight makes it a fight without a struggle, and soon, they are reunited.

Edelgard flees it. She can't. She simply can't. She growls and returns to the camp, to clean her weapons and armor, to pretend that the joy of today did not happen. To fight her urge to smile, because her unwillingness to feel anything at all is the only reason she has not shattered.

Byleth watches her go, worried, and Dorothea teaches the professor, for once- and the subject is Edelgard.

( But inside Edelgard, that spark refuses to die.)

-

Byleth's return prompts a flurry of activity. The monastery is reclaimed. Foolish and dangerous, it is right on the border; but perfect, because the plan is so audacious that even Claude cannot believe the reports he hears, that the monastery is being restored and that the Eagles are taking it as their nest. It would be so foolish, so stupid, and Edelgard has been so unemotional, so uncaring of things he had assumed she would care about, that he can't believe it; Edelgard has no emotional connections left, she would not restore the monastery and take it as her home.

But Edelgard would, if advised by Byleth, and Claude does not know that the woman he was so in love with has survived, and that she is now ready to take the world back from him and the dragon he serves.

And so it is that, perched directly on the border of the Alliance, the Black Eagles are perfectly safe, for a time.

-

Where to begin?

Byleth asks many questions as they work, seeking both to understand what has happened in the meantime, but also to figure out their next move. The one question that matters is this: where are the rest of Saint Cethleann's tribe? Dragons of their own, dragons with experience fighting their own kind, would be a boon, and the dragons that have joined the Eagles are none of the older ones, consist mostly of young dragons who cannot quite stomach Seiros' war.

Edelgard has not sought them out, even though Dorothea has advised it, regarding it as too risky, too dangerous. Surely all the remnants have been wiped out by now, and would the survivors still be friendly? It seems to be staking their entire rebellion on a strange fantasy, and after the death of Garreg Mach and the end of her joy, Edelgard cannot believe that such risky bets will pay off.

But... Byleth has returned. A miracle. An impossible miracle. And that spark inside her, that hurts so much... it makes her... believe.

So that night, the war council sits at the table in Garreg Mach, and Flayn tells them their history.

-

Long ago, when the Goddess still lived, there was a disagreement.

Two great peoples lived in Fodlan then, one native to this planet and one born of the Goddess' blood after she landed here from a distant star. They were the Children of the Goddess and the Agarthans. The Agarthans were your government at the time- the human government in Fodlan- while all of what you now call 'dragons' were called Children of the Goddess. Nabatea. Not all humans were Agarthans, but all humans were ruled by the Agarthans, just as all Children were ruled from Zanado, which you now call the Red Canyon.”

“ I was a child at the time, as my people reckon things, so my memory of it is... fragmented. Suffice to say that the disagreement was over certain technologies the Agarthans were developing. Sothis was eventually called on to resolve the dispute. She admitted that her heart told her to go with her Children, but she feared she was biased towards them, and so she ruled in favor of Agartha, but ordered it to be cautious, and that she herself would watch over the new technologies. I am not sure what the drawback was- perhaps environmental destruction, concern over ethics, perhaps simple destructive potential.”

“ Regardless, Seiros, one of Sothis' children, took offense to this, and she began to gather followers. She originally intended to leave Fodlan, to find a place where humanity did not exist. This was unlikely at best- you humans are native to this world, you had already spread out over most of it when we arrived- but perhaps there were islands in the sea you had not reached, or secluded places too harsh for your ancestors to conquer. That was the original idea, anyway; Seiros had been one of Sothis' favorite children, had in fact been her most favored daughter, and she had felt so very _betrayed _by the decision.”

“ Still, mother and daughter were patching it up, at the end. Sothis intended to bless Seiros' attempt to find a new home, and my father- who you know as the Dragon Knight, as Seteth, but his name is Cichol- was one of Seiros' most favored servants, and so intended to take me with them. I would be valuable, as a sea dragon, able to swim and explore and find our new homeland... and Seiros entertained the idea to my father, in private, that once the new land was successful, perhaps they would establish ties with Fodlan again, to show her mother that she had forgiven her.”

A sigh, released after long ages.

“ Then Sothis was murdered by the Agarthans in her sleep. It turned out that some of them felt she was still an impediment. They killed our progenitor, our very god- have you ever felt a god die? You would not believe the horror of it. We knew it in our bones, all our hearts stopped when hers did, just for a second. They murdered her as she slept, and they made a sword out of her bones, and your Crest- your very Crest, Edelgard- out of her blood. They defiled the body and left what remained for the crows in Zanado.”

“ I'm not sure whose hands killed the Goddess. I have my suspicions, but if it's who I think it is, then... then my feelings are complicated, and I don't want to go into them. But regardless, Agartha was responsible for giving the order, and Seiros... she seemed to blame herself. To blame her decision to leave for distracting her mother, to wonder how things might have went if more of us were in the Red Canyon instead of in Fodlan's Throat, where our great migration was going to begin. She would never reconcile with her mother, she would never be able to make her proud, or make up for what she'd said to her. And to make things worse, Seiros had been right, we all felt that for a time, we were too angry to do anything but agree. Seiros was right and the humans were overstepping their bounds.”

“ She decided that the gloves were off; and what was supposed to be a group devoted to leaving Fodlan instead become invaders, seeking to wipe the Agarthans off the map.”

“ I... the war... I was so young. Younger than you were, when this all began. It seems like I've always been at war... I find this more relaxing than the days of peace I woke up in, during this age. War is familiar to me. Peace is a memory I vaguely recall from my innocent youth...”

“ At any rate, we attacked, and the war quickly become a quagmire, not the swift victory Seiros promised us. The Agarthans wiped out many of us, and we were never numerous to begin with. What saved the war was that the humans underwent a civil war about a year after our invasion started. Nemesis, formerly a bandit, somehow got his hands on both the Crest of Flames and the Sword of the Creator, and he took his band of thieves and bastards and turned them into an army. An army of the common man, seeking to overthrow their leaders, who established rules and laws and tried to hold to them, even in extremity. They made multiple attempts to reach out to us, to form an alliance.”

“ Seiros didn't care for the distinction, she wanted to burn every human who dared hold a tool in their hands, reduce all your people to something less than animals- and I only knew he'd even tried to engage diplomacy because my father was her adjutant. It was then that I knew I could not stomach this, I could not support this; revenge was one thing. Slaughter was another.”

“ A year and a half into it, I abandoned the war, fleeing west, to Enbarr, at that time just a collection of villages around an iron mining pit. That was where Nemesis made his home. I took with me all the dragons who would go, cousins and uncles and kin of mine and friends and friends of friends, and we approached him, to make an alliance with humans, and live in peace with each other, the way we had when Sothis still lived.”

“ And that accidental tribe we formed, well, you know our names through the Church Nemesis established; I'm pleased by it, I must admit. It's... sweet. Very human of him... but I am fond of humans. I recognize your kindnesses, your attempts to memorialize your lives and conquer eternity, and I am moved by them. I am grateful, for what he did, that in this day and age my name is a name of honor among your kind.”

She sighed.

“ It wasn't enough. We were the underdogs of that three-way war; Goddess, how familiar I find all this... once more, I fight for Enbarr, once more dragons pour out of the East to eat all Fodlan and devour the souls of your people. Once more, I am on the side that is most vulnerable. I feel like this is simply how it will always be...”

“ Long story short, I met Nemesis and, believing in his justice and honor, swore to serve him, and me and mine did what we could to join our societies together, and eventually I lost a fight with Seiros and should have died. I don't know why I'm alive. I think- I remember my father picking me up after the battle- but he had grown to hate me so, for leaving Seiros. It must be just... a fantasy, a little dream of being protected by one's parent long after such protection has passed.”

“ However I lived, I did- well, somewhat. I was almost dead up until about ten years ago, sleeping- we can heal if we sleep, but apparently I was so close to death it took me literal centuries to recover. Given the Goddess' crest inside you, Byleth, I think that you slept to recover from your fall, and that's why you skipped these five years- the same way we do. I don't know where the others went, or how many of us lived- I'm not even sure how Nemesis won his war- but, well, here I am.”

She gives a small, sad grin.

-

“ But if Agartha killed the Goddess, why did Solon try to revive her in me?” Byleth asked.

“ I think Solon believed the official story,” she said. “ Remember, he is a modern human, descendant of Agartha, but still born in this strange new Fodlan of yours, and you have so many strange ideas about what the Agarthans were like. You... what is the opposite of demonization? You cleanse them, make angels of your former oppressors. Strange. Perhaps it happened simply because of the weight of time, the drift in memory, the great weakness of you humans. It does not surprise me that Solon should fall victim to that distorted history, though how he found the heart of the Goddess, I do not know. I don't even know why there was Agarthan technology under Garreg Mach- that was one of my people's habitations. It shouldn't have been there.”

“ What... was my ancestor like?” Edelgard asked, not quite wanting to... but the spark inside her wants to grow, and she always did like Nemesis.

Flayn- Cethleann- smiled at her. “ A good man, by human and dragon standards both- my leader, my king. Funny to say- I was older than him by some decades- but maturity and wisdom are not just functions of age, and I was- and still am- proud to serve him. He was... haunted... I have my suspicions as to why... but no. I will not speak ill of him. Whatever demons haunted his eyes... he was a champion of the people, _both _peoples, humans and Nabatea both.”

“ A fine champion too- Nemesis did not gather an army by accident. He was tremendously charismatic, in a stoic, powerful way. He was the kind of man who could say something and you just _believed _him, no matter what it was, he did not speak so much as he _intoned_. Even I, a dragon, found it... imposing.”

Her smile grew melancholic.

“ Strong. Strong as a human could be, and then equipped with both the Sword and the Crest... stronger than dragons. Obsessed with doing the right thing, he wanted to fix every problem in the world, to atone for some terrible deed he would never speak about. I am not surprised that the Empire he established has lasted all these years. Nemesis' efforts were not just martial, but political- unifying human nations, establishing laws and rules... it's almost like having my king back, to see this Empire of his. I didn't tell you at the time, Edelgard, but now that all this truth is out, I can; I was secretly deeply pleased that it was you who saved me when I was hurt in Remire. Descendant of Nemesis, ruler of the land he established, for you to rescue me... it has always felt... right.”

Her smile turned warm, and the fire inside Edelgard flickered to life. Just a little- but it was more warmth than she had felt in five years.

Basking in that glow, she almost didn't hear Dorothea's next question.

“ What... what else happened, back then, that you remember?”

“ We stole so much,” Flayn said, smile turning into a cheeky grin. “ A bandit at heart, Nemesis was, and it kept us going. We stole Agarthan technologies, we stole food from Seiros' armies, we stole everything that wasn't nailed down. We stole back my people's corpses, the weapons they made of them- including Aymr, your pretty axe, Edelgard, that you lost here. That was a cousin of mine, once.”

Oh. Edelgard swallowed hard, ice smothering her fire again. “ I am sorry,” she said, carefully. “ If... if we find it, we can bury it.”

Flayn shook her head. “ He fought for Seiros. I cannot claim to miss him. You use what you have to, in wars like this. Even the corpses of my brethren.”

No. That... that wasn't right. Edelgard, propelled by the memory of warmth, said, “ I am sorry that this has happened to you, and swear that when this war is over, I will bury all the weapons made of your people. This should never have happened.”

Dorothea looked at her, at this ghost of the woman Edelgard was supposed to be, but Edelgard, strength spent, faded back to ice and ashes.

“ But, that is for later,” she said, “ we must focus on practical matters. Where are the rest of your people?”

“ I do not know for sure... but I have an idea,” Flayn said, and a plan is made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Too long for a single chapter, been split into two. The last chapter will be up as soon as I can get it there!


	3. In Our Adulthood

**IN OUR ADULTHOOD**

Flayn's idea is simple. She knows of a lake one of her honorary uncles favored,a dragon who became like a father to her when her own father disowned her- Indech, who was always a strange one among the Nabatea, who seemed to admire the strength of fragile humanity, who had never blamed them as a whole for Sothis' death, who was the first to join her runaway tribe.

In the short time she had at Garreg Mach, she had studied legends of dragons, hunting where her accidental tribe had went after it had ended, and she has pegged the lake as a likely place to retreat- a lake with a small village near it, a village that bears her name. Cethleann.

Not that big of a deal. Many small villages take the names of the Saints. There are fifteen Charons in eastern Adrestia alone. But a village bearing her name, on the shores of Indech's favorite lake, whose inhabitants seemed to have done their best to be ignored by history... and who were, mysteriously, never, ever attacked by bandits, something so simple and yet so telling that she checked the records thrice to make sure.

Any bandit attacks would be covered up, by her tribe- and easily dealt with. Bandits have trouble with trained human soldiers; a single dragon could eat an army of the usual kind of bandit. Perhaps literally, Indech always did have a big appetite, though eating humans was something Sothis herself had despised and that even Rhea does not promulgate.

She thinks her tribe is there, hidden in secret. Powerful and ancient, their presence would add considerable weight to the Black Eagles, and considerable authority, too- it would legitimize them, in the eyes of Rhea's allies, to have such ancient dragons at their side. It might cause more dragons yet to abandon the Alliance, further weakening their foe.

The Alliance's own dragons, Flayn tells Byleth, have been fairly young by her people's standards, mostly born after the great war. Rhea has either not committed any great dragons to the offensive yet- or she has none to command. Flayn is not sure which; Nemesis won his war, obviously, but Flayn was not there, at the end, was already asleep, so she knows not the disposition of most of her former tribe nor of Seiros' faithful. She is not even sure her guess is right; but that little village by Indech's lake, bearing her name...

She _thinks _that is where her people are.

The problem- because there is always something- is that the village and the lake lie in distant lands, and getting there will require crossing into Alliance territory- going over the Great Bridge of Myrddin. A suicide run, that bridge, it is heavily defended, and guarded by one of Claude's favorites, Lorenz Hellman Gloucester.

Lorenz, who the Eagles remember as an annoying womanizer, who has, somehow, matured into the best of the Deer- the most honorable of the Golden Deer who will hold to his word, and who treats the civilians under him well, be they Adrestian or Alliance.

It leaves him as one of Claude's least-used pawns, and one of the few against whom the Eagles rarely fight. Still, his skill is said to be top-notch, and what few battles they've gotten into with him indicate this to be true, equally able with a lance or with spells. The Great Bridge of Myrddin, defended by a completely incompetent commander, would be a difficult task; guarded by someone who knows what they are doing, the task is impossible with their current forces.

...But Flayn's idea is attractive, and Byleth has an idea. Faerghus is under attack again, an enormous swarm moving now to assault Arianrhod, sacred fortress and silver maiden of Faerghus. The forces consist of Alliance troops and Faerghus traitors, the latter being members of of House Charon, which just a month ago endured a coup as its former presumptive heir, exiled for reasons no one in the Eagles know, returned, backed up by Rhea and the Alliance. She's a swordswoman named Catherine, who has some strange blade that can cut down a dozen men in a single blow, like lightning striking from heaven.

Worse, she has Marianne with her- Marianne, who had been so soft, so gentle. Marianne, who is one of Rhea's favorites, they hear, who worships her and her dragons as Sothis' favored, who preaches endlessly and works to convert all humanity to the faith of dragons. Marianne is a miracle worker with her words, the girl who once could not stand to be in the presence of others now charismatic in a sweet, disarming kind of way, voice a soprano trap.

Edelgard sardonically remarks, as Byleth is updated on the situation, that it only proves an old adage- watch the quiet ones.

(Byleth does not miss how surprised everyone is by the remark, by the genuine attempt at... humor. Some of the old Edelgard is back, no matter how much she tries to hide it, some spark in her is catching fire.)

Hubert is able to explain, at least a little, what happened, based on what his spies have picked up- that Marianne's family had, in secret, borne a Crest, and unlike Edelgard's own Crest, considered sacred sign of Sothis' favor, Marianne's Crest was a terrible and hidden burden, proof they had served dragons in the past.

(Though given the revelations Flayn has dropped on them, it is hard to still consider Edelgard's Crest a holy thing.)

Marianne had been seduced to Claude's cause when Rhea praised her Crest, claimed it as kin of her own, told her it made her holy- and Marianne, suicidal and hungry to be told she was not a monster, clung to that idea, hung onto every word of praise Rhea offered her. Rhea had, effectively, saved her from suicide, and so now no matter what she does, Marianne is totally dedicated to her cause; no more loyal soldier of Rhea can be found.

But despite that danger, there is this fact, too: Cornelia, Dimitri's beloved stepmother, is the one in charge of the defense of Arianrhod. She's still recovering from whatever illness has nearly killed her and her husband, but the Kingdom is in such dire straits that she was sent to the front anyway. Saving her will put Dimitri in the Eagles' debt, and free up Kingdom forces; perhaps enough forces to help them punch through Myrddin, reach that little village, and see if Flayn's people are not just alive, but willing to go back to the ancient war.

It's a risky gamble, but the Eagles must try something; five years has taught them that, dangerous as they are, they are not going to win this with conventional means. To chase the lost dragon tribe of Cethleann is a fairy tale thing; but they are things of fairy tales too, now, there are legends and stories about all of them. Maybe they should trust in that.

The group discusses it, all except Annette, who claims that as a former Kingdom citizen, she is too biased in its favor to give accurate counsel. General discussion is in favor of the attack, if for no other reason than that, if Arianrhod finally falls, Faerghus itself will be so open to assault that it will be overrun in a matter of months; and that will increase the already unbearable pressure on the Eagles, should the Kingdom finally fall Claude will have more resources to dedicate to his great hunt, and that is something the Eagles won't survive.

At the end, Edelgard asks Dorothea what she thinks of the plan- and Byleth notes that it is not until Dorothea agrees that it's worth a shot that Edelgard gives the command.

(Edelgard is aware of who it is that holds the rebellion together, in the absence of... well, her, when she goes away inside. She is so grateful for that, but she... she can't admit to it, she can't come out of her shell, or she will break. She can't even express her gratitude for fear of fires inside herself...)

-

As they journeyed to Arianrhod, Edelgard, tagging along with Dorothea, Byleth and Hubert and half-listening to the trio's discussion of strategy, was approached by Flayn.

“ Edelgard?' she asked.

“ Yes?” Edelgard responded, feeling a... weight... that had not been present before. Partly because Byleth's mere existence was waking her up, set ashes alight inside her, but mostly because now, knowing the truth, knowing who Nemesis was to Cethleann- knowing that he was such a great leader that, all these centuries after his death, Flayn _still _called him “my king”...

Well, Edelgard felt a little pressure, that was all, to live up to a family legacy she hadn't even known she'd had. It reminded her of when Hubert had come, and told her the legacy of his family's service to hers- just more of her history she has never been privy to. The stories the Church told of the war... they were not quite what Flayn had described.

Cethleann had been presented as always opposed to Seiros- and older, in the stories, almost a wise mother figure, not this scarred old soldier, who was more like Edelgard than she was like anyone else. A teacher to Nemesis, not some scared, heroic girl who only followed what she knew to be right, no matter the cost, no matter that it estranged her from her father- who had never been in history, whose name was not known to Fodlan.

Just another war-torn, violent teenager, to whom peace was an aberration in a life of battle.

Edelgard had time to be sardonic, and thought, _No wonder she's one of my Black Eagles- warriors in our teens, survivors and veterans at twenty, how does one go back from that? She was a Black Eagle before there were Black Eagles to be, prototype of our rebellion._

“ When we retake Enbarr,” Flayn said, “ I'd like to go to Nemesis' grave. I read about it in one of the history books. I'm glad they buried him under that old tree- he always liked it. Tell me, do children still play there? He always wanted it to still be a happy place, full of good memories.”

_That old tree_. The great Adrestian Gray Oak that sat behind the Imperial castle, under which was the simple dirt grave of the man who had founded the Empire. Edelgard had played in its branches as a child, the way generations of her family had done so; that had been Nemesis' last request, that his grave be not some hallowed shrine, but merely a marker, that children play in the tree the way they had in his own time, a request honored by all the generations since. His tomb's epitaph had been one of the first things she'd ever read, old words engraved in old stone in her young eyes and whispered by her young lips.

_No more for love of gold or power shall I fight, but now and forever only for a better future._

“ They do,” Edelgard said softly, remembering siblings playing with her in that beautiful, gnarled old tree. Flayn smiled.

“ Good. You humans forget so much... but you make so many things. Maybe you have to throw away old things to make new ones. We're not like that. We remember everything, perfectly, but we don't _make _things. We are destroyers, inherently, it is hard for us to... create, the way you do, the way you make so many new things. I sometimes wonder if, maybe, our two peoples were meant to be one- dragons to remember the past, humans to forge the future. Maybe that was the plan all along. This world was not Sothis', but she loved you humans as her own children, and maybe we dragons were created to balance you out.”

Flayn sighed, the smile dying as her memories turned bitter.

“ I used to fantasize about after the war, about... we talked about it. Me and the others- my tribe and the Elites. I would watch over his family, his brood- he'd gotten around a lot in his younger days, had a bunch of kids- and keep the memory of the war, keep everyone on track. Imperial Historian, that was going to be my title. We would live in peace, the way we were supposed to, a way I had never known except in dreams of my childhood.”

“ Then I was wounded, and when I awoke, I feared all he'd done had been forgotten... but you've managed to remember that much, even in my absence, and I thank you for it. My king deserved that much, even if I could not give it to him.”

Her sorrow was almost a palpable thing, and Edelgard, who in her heart of hearts wanted to soothe all the world's sorrows, felt a fire burst into life inside her, a fire that demanded she speak, and without quite meaning to, she ground out her next words, in a tone so serious that, just for a second, Flayn saw Nemesis standing there, heard her king in Edelgard's voice.

“ I will take you there, you have my word. And this time, when I say the war is over, it will be over, for all of us. For you too, Flayn- you have been at war longer than anyone alive. There will be a place for you in Adrestia when it is reborn, whether it be Imperial Historian, Queen of your tribe, or simply as a common citizen, to live in peace. You and your people will be welcome in Enbarr, and all the lands under my crown.”

Hubert and Dorothea were taken aback, both stop their conversation to stare. That... that had sounded like _old _Edelgard. Garreg Mach Edelgard, who cared, who was so awkward and so strange, and so heroic that even as a child she had saved Petra. Edelgard, not the lord of a dead soul she had become.

Flayn was taken aback, too, but for a different reason- because now, finally and fully, she believed that Edelgard truly was Nemesis' descendant, that some of her king's blood flowed through Edelgard's veins. That had sounded too much like him to dismiss.

After a moment following that eruption of a proclamation, Flayn said, haltingly, “ Will your people accept me? Dragons have haunted their nightmares for five years now.”

Edelgard shook her head and, with an effort, gave Flayn a smile. Goddess, this is why she goes to the ashes, this... this _hurts_, it _hurts_ to care. It _burns_ her, to feel, and she can hear her ghosts whispering, the fire draws their attention like a lighthouse on the shore.

But if anyone deserves her concern, no matter the cost, this woman does- this woman, who is still loyal to Nemesis, after all these long years.

“ The _Alliance _and _Rhea _haunt my people's nightmares. But Saint Cethleann and her sacred band of dragons are their guardians and protectors; you are more likely to be in their dreams, Flayn. Children pretend to be you, adults pray for your protection, and there is no rebel soldier who is not relieved to see you or your kin at their side.”

“ Humans have fought humans for centuries; we have no urge to expel ourselves, to hate our base humanity for that. Neither is your race to blame for the sins some of you have committed. As there are good and bad humans, there are good and bad dragons. It is a simple truth, and Adrestia understands it. And any who find it in them to be willfully ignorant shall learn at their Emperor's command.”

Flayn gave her a soft smile, and Edelgard smiled back before letting her flames die down.

“ Of course,” Hubert said, “ the grave isn't where Nemesis' body rests.”

“ What?” Flayn asked. Edelgard nodded.

“ Nemesis disappeared,” she said. “ He left with his Elites. The only thing we got back was the Sword of the Creator and some of their relics, like my old axe, Aymr, borne back to us by Hubert's ancestor with instructions to bury the Sword at Garreg Mach and to make a grave marker for Nemesis. According to Duke Vestra, Nemesis had told him that there wouldn't be anything left of him or his Elites to bury once they got where they were going. All we know is that after he left, Seiros disappeared, and the war was over.”

Flayn frowned. “ Where in the world did he go?”

“ Popular theories abound. Some say the Valley of Torment, that the Valley exists because the last battle between him and Seiros was so fierce it scarred the land. Others claim he used the last Javelins of Light in a suicide attack in the ruins of Shambhala, destroying himself and Seiros in a hail of technological catastrophe. Others say he just went back to being a bandit when his work was done.”

“ Well, I can say this, at least,” Flayn said, frowning. “ Seiros isn't dead.”

“ She isn't? I thought you weren't around for the last battle?” Byleth said.

“ I wasn't,” Flayn said. “ But I saw Rhea. That was Seiros. You don't forget the face of the woman who tried to tear your kidneys out with her teeth- well, maybe not the best example, given she was a dragon at the time. But her human form had been consistent for centuries- all she's done is add that headdress and change her name.”

“ Well, shit,” Dorothea said. “ Seiros... I... I'm going to need some time to process that. Every Church teaching is about her, about the terrible things she did...”

“ They're mostly correct,” Flayn mentioned. “ I read the holy book. Much is wrong, but much is right, and the atrocities described therein are fairly accurate.”

“ Don't like hearing that,” Dorothea admitted, and even Edelgard chuckled a bit at that.

“ Seiros...” Byleth said, quietly, with an expression unreadable by Edelgard's eyes. Byleth had been... different, since waking up. The changes she'd underwent fighting through the brilliant light Rhea had banished her to had... accelerated, in her sleep, and now Byleth was Byleth-but-also-more.

Edelgard was glad for it. They needed every edge they could get.

“ Speaking of name changes, why did you change your name, Cethleann?” Hubert asked, drawing Edelgard's attention away from Byleth's musings.

She shrugged. “ Keeping my own name would have raised too many questions... even if I'd have lied and claimed I was just named for the Saint, pretending to have been named after, well, myself, was simply too strange. Flayn was a healer I once knew. I always admired her courage.”

“ Do you prefer we call you Cethleann?” Byleth asked, and Flayn shook her head.

“ I don't care which you call me; they are both my names. Nabatea are less... concerned with names, so long as they all refer to the same person, in the end.”

Then word comes back that they are nearing the border, and planning begins again in earnest.

-

The battle is so big that, hours before they reach the field, the Eagles can hear the roar of war. They slink in close, five years as refugees making them silent and secret, able to fly close to danger without alerting the foe, and they observe the battlefield for a while from hidden roosts.

The news isn't good. The Sacred Maiden, which is partly afire, is still standing despite everything- but the enemy forces are _everywhere_, dear Goddess, there are even children in the ranks, younger than any of the Eagles were when the war began. House Charon's lands must stand _empty_, to have so many soldiers present here, an almost literal sea of swords surrounding the besieged fortress. Kingdom knights defend the walls desperately as Fhirdiad sorcery and arrows decimate row after row of the enemy, but like the shore fighting the ocean, there is always another wave to contend with. The fortress will fall; it is merely a question of time and corpses.

The Charon troops are mostly untrained and scared kids, the Eagles can tell, conscripted and gang-pressed souls whose eyes are bright lights of terror underneath their helmets; they would run, except that officers stand over them, officers whose eyes hold no such doubts, who bear Alliance flags and wear dragon masks.

Even as they watch, one scared teen breaks off, and she is cut down a second later by an officer's dismissive spell, sliced in half by a gust of razor-edged wind. The others, seeing that there is no hope of escape backwards, redouble their efforts to break through. Desperation can turn even the least-trained soldier dangerous; the commander of the Charon forces is turning entire handfuls of their own troops into cornered rats, and terror drives them to punch above their weight class.

Normally, a knight of Faerghus could cut down a dozen such conscripts; but they cannot handle the assault of four frenzied berserkers, more scared of the officers at their back than of the enemy before them.

There is a steel core of soldiers here, real soldiers, but they are _behind _the enemy ranks, an imposing threat that will cut down any who try to run. Additional insurance, past the officers, that the conscripts will not run. The commander is there, judging by the messengers who keep running back and forth- and judging by the sounds that issue forth, a preacher, oddly calm in the face of war, preaching indistinctly above the chaos.

Well. The Eagles hatch a plan based on what they know; their numbers are few, but they have learned over the years to be as careful as a surgeon with their strikes, and this situation has a fairly obvious weakpoint.

Edelgard doesn't really participate in the planning. Edelgard is gone almost the instant she sees Arianrhod burning; too much fire, too many scared kids, too much like Brigid. This... _injustice _makes her so angry that she cannot focus, so she puts the anger away, smothers it, turns to ashes again.

Rendered thus, she calmly, quietly listens as the others discuss, and finally, Dorothea gives out the orders. They can't possibly fight _half _the forces here, and the Eagles find it sickening to battle children; but the kids don't want to fight. If they can kill the commanders, they'll break and run; you don't have to fight an enemy who flees.

A single great dive then- swooping down into the command post before they know what's happening, kill them all, then retreat, so that the Eagles themselves aren't between the conscripts and freedom. Give the conscripts a way _out_, and they will take it.

They slip past the outer guards with practiced ease, Hubert and Bernie going among them and tearing them down, silent arrows and silent magic. Dorothea readies herself; the first volley is what counts, the first attack must strike so deep that the enemy cannot recover. The Eagles get in position around the command post, whose warriors are understandably more concerned with the conscripts before them, trusting to the now-dead rearguard to protect them.

This close, they can hear the preaching more clearly, and the voice sounds... familiar. The preaching is oddly soothing, inappropriate for the battlefield, sweet in tone.

Dorothea shakes off the jitters that gives her, and gives the signal- a bolt of screaming lightning that she fires from her hands, that strikes one of the knights at the command post and renders him into bloody chunks of ash that blind those closest to him.

The Eagles slam into the foe, who are dying before they even know they are under attack. Annette in particular is in fine fury, grateful that the Eagles have chosen to save her people, her winds lashing out in tornadoes and gusts that even Hubert has trouble keeping up with. A tremendous assault, which goes smoothly and well- up until the preaching stops, and out of the command tent steps... Marianne?

She is drowned in golds, her clothes fine things bearing the Alliance's color. The bluenette's hair is loose, it looks like Rhea's hairstyle, and she wears a small coronet in her hair, upon which is perched a diamond that looks... a _lot _like Flayn's dragonstone.

“ Who comes here, to interfere in our sacred work?” she asks, but politely, as though she were at a tea party, and not in the midst of battle. A soldier dies right next to her and she does not even flinch, merely looking at Byleth with an expression of... disappointment?

“ The homunculus and her servants,” Marianne sighs. She is calm, too calm, only Edelgard has ever been that calm before, and the sight shocks her. Is _this _what she is like? Even as Edelgard cuts down enemies, even as the Black Eagles attack- Marianne is... empty.

“ May the Goddess forgive thee,” Marianne says quietly, reaching up to touch the stone in her circlet. “ And grant me strength to perform holy labours.”

“ That's not possible,” the Eagles hear Flayn say, right before Marianne _changes_.

This is not the change of manaketes, who lose their human disguises to assume a true form. There is something almost miraculous about that, something appropriate, a change to one's true self.

But this... this is something else, this is something _wrong_. Marianne warps and buckles under the stresses of the stone, storm clouds pouring forth from the gem, dark grey dragon scales like writhing eels bursting out of her skin and shredding it to make new muscles and new tissue- skinless flesh, revealing the muscle underneath. Great beastly formations grow out of her shoulderblades, like great tumors, things that should have been leathery wings but are left at great curving scythes of bones, lightning arcing between the exposed vertebrae. Her hands warp into claws, and thin, delicate grey scales wrap around her withered face as her transformation completes.

When it is done, she strides above the battlefield, enormously tall, arms stretched grotesquely, floating above the fray. She seems almost a... parody of humanity and Nabatea both, a mixture of the two species that is somehow living blasphemy against both. This is not a merging of races to make something more than its parts, but a defilement of both its bases, a mockery of life.

They all stop and stare. Even Edelgard, so calm in her ashes, cannot help but be stunned by this... abomination, though she is calm enough to note that the soldiers with Marianne have the same reaction- this is something new, even the dragon masks are surprised by whatever this is. Catherine arrives from the front, running back to her command tent, but Marianne's calm eyes, filled with storm clouds, draw all attention.

“ Homunculus, unholy one,” she says, so calmly, so quietly, though her voice reverberates with echoes of a dragon's roar. It's almost comforting, like a mother explaining death to a child. “ Please, submit yourself to my grasp. You are an abomination that was never meant to be. Your very existence is suffering. I know all about that. Let me free you from it, as Rhea's sweet gift has freed me of my pain; let me take Sothis' heart from your chest, and take it to Rhea, that it may be reborn properly, and the Goddess return to the earth.”

She raises her mutated hands. Storm clouds swirl about her fingers.

“ The rest of you- do not oppose me. Surrender, and you shall be allowed to live. I am a Hierophant, the will of Rhea made flesh. We are her most holy ones, the bridge between divine Nabatea and fallen humanity, and our word is divine law,” Marianne states, as thunder rolls from her palms. “ I bear the might of the Beast, storm dragon, sacred servant of the Goddess. Blessed to rise above my base humanity and embrace a piece of the the transcendant glory of dragons, Goddess be praised. Please, surrender, that your souls may be saved; resist, and you shall be unmade.”

An Eagle soldier recovers from his surprise, and looses an arrow that skids off of the exposed muscle of Marianne's right shoulder. With a small, sad smile, Marianne waved a talon in his direction- and an arc of lightning tears through him and all the Eagles standing near him, reducing five of Edelgard's soldiers to electricity-wrecked corpses with a single motion.

The violence erupts again, the lightning bolt the spark needed to relight the war. Byleth tackles Marianne, the Sword of the Creator flicking out, Marianne blocking with her leatherless wings even as she continues to spew lightning for her warped hands. Catherine fights, too, deadly as a thunderbolt herself, and the twin storms try to drive the Eagles back. Dorothea orders Bernadette and Caspar to finish off the officers before assisting, and moves Annette and Linhardt to aid the professor; Edelgard barely hears her orders as the Emperor throws herself at Marianne.

Edelgard is short, and Marianne is so tall now; it gives her an opportunity to slide around her, and to hack at her legs. This does little harm, even as thick gouts of static-charged blood erupt from the blow she strikes on what should be Marianne's Achilles' tendon; Marianne simply lifts into the air, floating, and lightning licks the ground where Edelgard had been a moment ago. Byleth's lashing sword tears a gash in Marianne's back, which Catherine answers with a furious assault that leaves the professor dodging and unable to respond. Edelgard moves to assist, but Marianne backhands her in the chest so hard that she goes flying into a tree, sparks trailing off her armor.

She catches her breath a moment, slightly stunned, sees Byleth headbutt Catherine and carve a chunk out of her face with her blade. Sees Linhardt desperately healing Ferdinand, hit by an arrow in a vital place, sees Dorothea hurl a bolt of lightning at Marianne that simply merges with the thunders already in the Hegemon's twitching fingers.

Sees the newly empowered monster wave its hand and strike down another dozen of her soldiers, men bursting apart at the seams as the lightning cooks them alive.

Then back into the fray. Edelgard slams into the wounded Catherine with force enough that it sends the big woman sprawling, and she hurls a bolt of fire into Marianne's face that forces her to drift away, scowling. Fire... she doesn't like fire...

“ We can burn it!” she hears Dorothea call out. Goddess bless her, Edelgard can't do what she does, can't give orders like this- the ashes consume her throat- but Dorothea pays attention, Dorothea does what Edelgard _should _be doing, but can't. She can't speak at all, not like this.

“ I've got an idea!” Annette yells, enraged, and their Witch Knight- seeing her beloved homeland burn, this place that her family has defended for generations- begins to cast with a fury so concentrated it is almost physical. Swirling green magic all around her- and around Arianrhod itself, she is not casting her spells on Marianne but on the burning part of the Sacred Maiden Fortress. What is she doing?...

A tornado is called up, a whirlwind of flaming debris that sucks up all the fire, turning it into a spiral of roaring flames. Annette does not cast her words so much as shout them, and the fire rises high, higher, highest, a column of burning wood and blazing air that sucks all the fire out of Arianrhod, that lights up this nighttime battlefield like the sun at noon.

They all stop and stare at that, except Catherine, who takes the opportunity to run, applying half an elixir to her bleeding skull as she runs off to find a horse. This battle is lost, and Rhea must be told.

Annette finishes her spell. The great blazing tower bends, curves- and at the last moment Marianne understands what Annette was doing, as that entire blazing column falls directly upon her.

Marianne screams as she burns. Her storm clouds form a shield that lasts only a few seconds under that wildfire weight; Annette keeps casting, the wind keeping the fire tightly contained in a circle around the abomination, baking her from the inside out.

Annette finishes finally, slumping down exhausted as the fire and wind both die, revealing a blackened, scorched thing of ash that melts, resolving itself into the half-dead form of Marianne, who is impossibly still alive after all that. Edelgard moves to finish her off, hefting her axe in hand; hardy as Marianne apparently is now, Edelgad doubts she can survive a beheading.

( If she can- well, then they'll get creative.)

Hoofbeats warn her a moment before she would have been run over, Edelgard dodging back as Catherine on horseback rides by at full gallop, swooping down to grab Marianne in the process, shoving the other half of her elixir down her throat as they ride off. Only Bernadette manages to get a shot off in time, the arrow sinking deep into Catherine's left shoulder- but Catherine is an old soldier, and she merely grunts as she makes her way off the battlefield.

“ Don't chase!” Dorothea orders. Catherine will know this area better than they would- this is on the border of Charon territory, her former home- and the fight with Marianne already cost them more soldiers than they'd planned on losing today. There is little chance Marianne will ever again be in any condition to fight, elixir or not,and Catherine was beaten handily by Edelgard and Byleth alone even _with _Marianne's help- she simply is not relevant. “ Eagles, grab the wounded, let's go!”

The Eagles retreat, grabbing their wounded and exhausted- Raphael's gentle hands picking up Annette, who cannot find her feet in the wake of her great spell- and leaving their dead for their black-clad kin, the crows. They flee the field, and in the wake of that escape, the conscripts- who have just witnessed the real soldiers get slaughtered, and seen the horrifying power of Annette- take a look at their officers, and another look at Arianrhod, which despite all their best efforts is still standing, imposing, the unbreakable fortress, not even on fire any longer.

Then they take a third look, at the dark forest, from which Eagles have emerged, slaughtering all in their path- the dark forest, from which Eagles might emerge yet _again_, and if Catherine and that dragon couldn't stop them, what can they do?

Every conscript comes to the same decision.

The leaders know it, too. One officer yells at them to go back to the fight, striking down a paused conscript to enforce his point. Another conscript, in panic, runs him through with his spear, and all hell breaks loose.

Shouts and screams go up as the army turns on itself, and the horde dissipates in moments as the conscripts kill their officers and flee, running back home, or running to nowhere at all, heading anywhere but this terrible battlefield.

And when all are gone, the Eagles send a messenger, and Cornelia herself comes out to greet them- bringing a friend along.

-

“ I had thought you were rumors,” she said, giving them a smile from Arianrhod's steps, surrounded by a bodyguard. Near her was a face Byleth had never thought to see again, someone from her teaching days, a peer- Hanneman. He appeared as he always did, the clumsy professor extraordinaire, unhurt and unscarred somehow, despite all this battle.

“ We like to be mysterious,” Dorothea replied, smiling as she looked over Cornelia. Howsoever Hanneman dodged the battle, Cornelia couldn't manage it; the Queen Mother looked like hell. Her wounds were clumsily and quickly patched up, white bandages soaked in red all around her midsection and arms. The cuts and scorchmarks on her clothes reinforced the story that the bloody wrappings around her midsection were telling; a true Queen Mother of this warrior's kingdom, Cornelia, she did not spend the assault sitting down.

“ Byleth! It's good to see you,” Hanneman said, because propriety was never his strong suit. “ You're looking well for a dead woman!”

Byleth chuckled softly, which any who knew her understood was a sign of how happy this meeting made her, how delighted she was to see him. “ You're looking well for an old man yourself.”

Hanneman laughed. “ I see your Eagles have done you proud! My Lions have done much the same.”

“ So we've heard,” Dorothea said, redirecting this conversation back on track. “ It is, in fact, one of those Lions we'd like to discuss.”

Cornelia nodded, then winced as the movement made her wounds ache.

“ You are wounded, madam,” Linhardt said, surprising everyone there; Linhardt had always been reserved, but five years in this hellhole war had made him almost stoic. The healer, not having forgotten all his graces, bowed lightly to the Queen. “ Would you have me restore you?”

“ Merciful Linhardt, my own personal healer!” Cornelia chuckled, and her smile was such that Edelgard's knees grew weak. The King of Faerghus was a lucky man. “ Quite a legendary figure to tend to me! But I am alright.”

Linhardt nodded. “ I am merely a healer, your highness. If you need assistance, feel free to ask.”

“ I will,” Cornelia replied. “ Now, young lady, I doubted that the Eagles have flown all the way over here just to save this old lioness in her den, and you mentioned wanting to talk about someone. Why did you come to our aid, grateful though I am for it?”

“ We would like to request aid from Dimitri,” Dorothea responded. “ We figured relieving the pressure on his Kingdom would make it more likely he would grant our request.”

“ A wise choice,” Cornelia answered. “ And an honest answer. You Eagles really are something special. Unfortunately, my son isn't in Faerghus. Dimitri is on his way into the Alliance, to the Great Bridge of Myrddin.”

“ What?” Byleth said, quirking an eyebrow.

-

The discussion is swift after that, because the Eagles are now on a time limit.

Dimitri is chasing Mercedes, chasing the one letter that managed to make its way back to him, all these years later. The letter is suspicious, incredibly so; there is a chance it is Mercedes' original letter, but there is also a chance it's a trick. It would not even be close to the first time that Claude has forged something, and the risk is very real that this is just a way to get Dimitri somewhere Claude can kill him.

Regardless, Dimitri feels he must take the risk. The coalition he has built to fight the Alliance is failing. Mercedes found something- an ancient system of Agartha- that can change everything, though the details the religious woman left were incredibly vague. Still, for gentle Mercedes to be so taken with it, there must be something there... and Dimitri has to risk it all, it's either certain doom or possible salvation, and in that situation, both the stupid and the wise choose possibility.

He'd taken a moment to send a letter of condolences to Mercedes' wife, a nun in Fhirdiad, who she had fallen in love with after Garreg Mach; Dimitri had been aware that the only reason the letter did not come with Mercedes herself attached is because she was caught out, had died. Her letter had indicated she would try to mislead the enemy. The lack of future letters, or of her presence, shows that her misdirection took her life- but the fact that no new power pours forth from the Alliance proves that the misdirection _worked_, that her life bought the distraction she'd been hoping to purchase, though the transformation of Marianne greatly worries Cornelia, who wonders if _this _was what Mercedes had found.

Still, at the time, Dimitri had not known of any transformation in Marianne, and so he had set out with all of his Lions and all the troops he could spare, following that letter, to the facility's supposed location, hidden deep in Alliance territory. Dangerous territory; guarded by Lysithea von Ordelia, who no one had seen in three years- rumors abounded as to why, though her poor health was a recurring factor. Mercedes' letter indicated it was more than that, though, whispered of other things in the dark, of some... change in her.

(Remembering Marianne, Edelgard can make a guess... but why disappear, then? Marianne had been entirely functional, if... different... what happened to Lysithea?)

But before he had even reached that place, an Alliance force had set out to attack him. All the reports indicate they will meet at a rather familiar place, and upon hearing of it, Edelgard's heart nearly stops.

Her life really _has _become a fairy tale.

“ They say history repeats, but that's not quite true,” Byleth says, as she looks at the reports Cornelia gives them, in hopes the Eagles can save her son, as they have saved her. She sounds as if she speaks from long experience. “ It's more accurate to say... it rhymes.”

Dorothea nods to the professor. This has the feeling of... destiny.

And so the Eagles wheel about... heading to a place in the East of Adrestia named Gronder Field.

-

Two scouts of Faerghus, outriders, run into an Alliance patrol in central Adrestia. It's not a surprise to run into them; the army Dimitri has brought is enormous, the biggest host gathered under the Kingdom's flag since the war began, his great gamble, the card draw that would win or lose it all. It is hard, to hide an army that size, and the Alliance knows _something _is up, even if they cannot find the precise location.

The patrol, on spotting them, tries to outrun them. Of course they do. They must report them in, and if they do, the Kingdom army will be stalled here, instead of reaching its real goal. The Kingdom scouts try desperately to stop them, but they can't do it- too many to kill quickly, and they are but two soldiers.

Three members of the patrol escape, are riding to safety, when a woman in Brigid clothes cuts them down in three swift strikes.

The scouts stare at her. They had heard rumors, but nobody had believed them...

“ Take me to Dimitri,” Petra says to them in flawless Fodlanese as she wipes her blade clean. “ I wish to speak with him.”

-

In Fodlan's Throat, where her exodus had once been meant to begin, in the new nest she had her servants build, Seiros- who in her own mind _never _thought of herself as Rhea- pondered the news.

Catherine had sent a letter explaining about the attack on Arianrhod- a useful servant, Catherine, prioritizing keeping Seiros informed over her own wants, even if her fawning and obvious desire was grotesque to Seiros' sensibilities. The very thought; even Seiros' own skin feels wrong when she is in human shape, she cannot imagine sliding it over another human's filthy form in lust and desire.

She sighed as she read the letters, looking down at these pale, pathetic fingers, the nails that, no matter how she sharpened them with a file, were a poor replacement for the claws she once had. She would not be whole until the day she reclaimed her true self. A thousand years in this human skin; she'd almost believe it to be penance for her failure to save her mother, were she a religious woman. But the Archbishop of her own false faith had no faith herself, and so regarded it as just what it was- a terrible tragedy.

If only Nemesis had not burst her dragonstone- she could not use another, for reasons she had never been able to figure out, save that she was the last Divine Dragon her mother had made, the others dying to Agartha all those years ago- and Seiros could not have dragon children in this form, she had tried, discarding the children when they proved to be as mortal as the skin she now wore.

She had simply lost access to herself, the way Cichol had after his daughter died... but his case was explainable. Grief and sorrow could manifest in a dragon that way; Cichol was not the only dragon who could not transform.

But Seiros bore no such grief inside, save that she still mourned her Mother, as any good daughter would; and she'd been mourning her for years and still transforming. It had to be tied to her nature as a Divine Dragon, the only one left; perhaps Mother had built them out of different stuff.

Still, no matter; she was used to this form after so long, and now, she was on the verge of reclaiming herself. Once she held her mother's Crest Stone in her hands, she would be able to place it in the device, and through it, ascend, regain herself.

It was a shame the stone hadn't been at Garreg Mach; her studies had led her to believe that the Church Nemesis had built- and damn him, damn him for this lie, for building this place to pretend that he had not murdered her mother!- had stored much of the old Agarthan relics in Garreg Mach, because if one was going to piss all over a sacred legacy, you might as well not half-ass it. Seiros had scoured the place for three years and found nothing, finally abandoning it; too many memories there. It was the same reason she had never been to Zanado in all these years- too many, too much, to go there would be to remember things that Seiros must forget, if she is to keep functioning.

( Mother dead, Mother desecrated, she had... she had been bringing her a gift, something to say she wasn't that mad anymore, she remembered how she'd actually felt a little silly being so mad. Mother had known best, of course. Seiros had never much liked humans, but maybe her Mother was right, and she was simply being harsh.)

( Then the way her heart had ached. The way the world had just... stopped. She had flown at full speed to Zanado and even then known what she would find, tears pouring from her eyes to see her mother shattered and broken, they had taken her _spine_, blood everywhere, Mother no no _no_...)

Seiros breathed in, breathed out. She pushed it away. To go down that road was to degenerate into a crying mess; and she was Sothis' daughter. She would not fail her Mother twice in one life; she would not let her murderers go unpunished.

The work was going well. Two of the nations of Fodlan under her control; the third to fall soon enough, the attack on Arianrhod failing today was of little consequence. Time was on her side, as it ever was in dealing with the mayfly humans. The continent was coming under control. Wherever the murdering bastards of Agartha had hidden the Crest Stone, she would find it.

Shame all her notes said it was at Garreg Mach, and that Solon had died in captivity, before he could tell her much. Further shame that she couldn't find his own notes; grabbed by some desperate servant in their flight from the monastery, she supposed. Oh well.

Just a matter of time.

So for now, she was still too human, and she had other things to focus on. Catherine must be lead on, her control reinforced- invite her to the Throat for a time. A touch here, a caress there, regardless of how it makes the bile rise in Seiros' throat. Stoke the fire of desire in Catherine so that she will not question orders. See how the transformation of her newest Hierophant is going- Ignatz, lovely Ignatz, who so worshiped the Goddess, and so had proven willing to accept the change, and so far, had survived it. Attend to Marianne personally, see to it that she recovered- a Hierophant was a significant investment for Seiros, after all. Few were worthy of the transformation, and fewer still were able to _survive _it.

She still remembered what had happened to the first test subject. That girl... Lysi... Lysie? She could never remember. One of Claude's compatriots. One of her former test subjects, in fact, which had amused her; the irony that the girl would end up being two prototypes in a single lifetime, though now that she was thinking on it, the name was bothering her. What _was _it? Thea? Isi.... no, it started with an L.

Regardless, while the girl had been her first successful dual-Crest experiment, she had not proven so lucky in her second prototyping. Even Seiros, who had seen and done worse, had been... _surprised _at the result, and simply grateful that Claude's pink-haired retainer had managed to exert some control over it.

Claude. Her... highest servant, she supposed, though she would never be able to make him a Hierophant; no, the experiment on the similarly dual-Crested had proven that it was impossible, unless she wanted another abomination on her hands. A shame; when she'd stuffed two Crests into him as a child, she hadn't thought it would have such side-effects.

Still, you live and learn, and even Claude, for all his usefulness, was only a human. When he died, she'd simply find another. It had been dumb luck he'd survived in the first place, where the thirty other half-breeds and outcasts she'd picked had died; poor material, she supposed. The other one had been her prototype, the... Lysia? The... dammit, she couldn't remember. The girl. She'd come from “noble” stock- as if human blood could be uplifted!- and it had taken Seiros fewer attempts to get two Crests into a single human using her family, though the girl had been the only survivor, at the end.

Too bad she'd only had a few notes of Agartha to work with, but Seiros had spent the last thousand years playing with dragon blood, trying to become herself again; that experience had compensated where the notebook scraps had run dry.

So Catherine later, which would be a chore... but attending to Ignatz and Marianne would not be terrible. A Hierophant was _almost _a dragon, a process she'd discovered by accident in her experimental attempts to regain her own transformation, and she could stomach their presence more easily than that of a human's. She'd make all her high priests Hierophants in the future; it would make it easier to talk to them, and they'd last long enough that she wouldn't be replacing them every few decades.

Finishing her current papers, she gave the completed letters to her personal servant, a quiet, stoic lad of Almyra named Cyril, before sitting back in her chair and closing her eyes, resting for a moment and pondering her past. Almyra had proven... receptive... to her, a nation of wyvern riders that was already used to treating draconic forms with a certain level of affection. A few decades spent studying human preachers and psychology, and she was able to make a warrior's church for them, claim that those who died in glorious battle would be admitted to the Goddess' realm, where war and wine and whatever you desired could be had forever.

A lie, of course. Her mother was dead and answered no prayers, and if an afterlife existed, Seiros had no knowledge of it. But very motivational; if she hadn't known it was all bullshit, she'd have been quite moved by some of her speeches herself. She had a dab hand at religion, it turned out.

She still remembered the “prophecy” she'd told them, under an entirely different name, that one day a woman named Rhea would rise up and guide them to conquer all the world, under the wings of great dragons.

She snorted, the memory amusing her as it always did. It's not prophecy, to let someone in on your schedule and itinerary. Humans. How short their lives were, how easily they... forgot.

Such base creatures, barely useful as pets. Untrustworthy with power, as Agartha had proven; but, much like any pet, with the right training and the right... _oversight_, they could perform all kinds of useful tricks.

Like Cyril, who was returning even now from delivering her papers to their messengers, and was bringing her favored tea, whose very smell made her mouth water and eyes open.

The _one _advantage to this human form, Seiros had to admit as she took the cup and sipped, was the sense of taste, so much more refined than a dragon's. For all their sense of smell was heightened, a dragon's tongue was dead in its mouth, an unfortunate side-effect of their powerful breath; humans, lacking the breath weapon, lacked the need for armored tongues, and so they were free to indulge themselves.

She'd miss it, when she was restored, but to give up a sense of taste for a body that fit _right_... she should enjoy this cup, it would be one of her last, and so she sipped it slowly.

What else on the agenda today?... Oh, yes. The Kingdom army at Gronder Field. Claude had assured her that he'd sent his best, another one of his Deer... a... Lozenge? No, that couldn't be right. Lore? Something like that. Why were there so many L names amongst Claude's little group? What a strange thing.

Between that commander- who Claude assured her was competent- and the additional insurance she'd provided by sending Cichol along with them, they'd catch the prince of the Kingdom at Gronder Field, and they'd murder him and his forces both. Then the last resistance would crumble, and she could become herself again.

She took another triumphant sip of her tea. It was good to be Seiros, some days.

-

Somewhere else in the Throat, somewhere hidden from prying eyes and listening ears, Claude, Grand Duke of the Alliance, once the Storm Caller, and Duchess Hilda, his most faithful retainer, have their last conversation. Tears stung Claude's eyes, though it is not he who goes forth into death today; Hilda's eyes remain calm and strong as the setting sun, embracing ending.

“ Don't do this, Hilda.”

She gave him a small, sad smile in response, his Hilda, his faithful one, who had clung to him close as his own shadow all these long years. Claude knew why- he knew everything, he had compensated for his short lifespan by learning everything, absolutely everything, devouring knowledge. He knew the history of House Goneril, the terrible crimes committed by it against the Almyrans, the things that Hilda had seen that she could never forget.

“ I have to, my dear Claude. You know that.”

The things that had driven her to imprison her own kin, after the war, assuming the title of Duke Goneril for herself, and continuing to serve him even as the Alliance expanded, his retainer, right hand, and executioner. She had done things she had never even told him, the most terrible deeds, all so his dream could be realized, that his great guilt be eased. So much blood on his hands, but even more would stain him, but that Hilda took up the burden of spilling it for him. She had always protected him.

“ Hilda... I... I'm not ready to lose you, not just yet.”

A world, united. No more borders. The ancient genocides undone. Seiros slain, so she could never repeat her great war. The Church broken down, so it could no longer claim that Agarthan descent made you superior. A dream that Claude had shared with Nemesis, with Cethleann, with all the great heroes- which was how he'd known that being a hero would never accomplish it. Better humans and better dragons both had tried and failed.

“ We always knew this day was coming, Claude. Someday, there would be a reckoning, and we would deserve it- we talked about this, remember? How important it was, to be honest with ourselves about all this. Not to lie and pretend that the dream justified it. You gave a whole speech about how, if you sacrifice others for your own dreams, it's not a sacrifice, remember? It was a good speech, I almost wish I'd written it down.”

So the dream had been accompanied by the scheme. The plan. If a hero couldn't do it, well... there was another option. He had always known what it would cost him, to create so much hate focused on his person; but he had never planned for what it would cost his _friends_. He had tried so hard not to care about them, but the former Deer were _his_, and seeing what he had done to them... There are not words for how sorry he is, for all this. It had not seemed like much of a sacrifice to give himself up, he would not see thirty if his willpower was strong as stone... but to lose the others...

“ I hadn't known it was going to be so _hard_, Hilda.”

She hugged him. She was so strong, he had time to marvel as he hugged her back; muscles like corded steel, an instrument of war tuned to high perfection. She had served him with unrelenting effort since they had met as children, her desperate to find someone, anyone, who could help her stop her family, he fresh from Seiros' experiments and burning with that unholy might. He had no idea how he was going to survive without her- but that was the point, wasn't it? He _wasn't _going to survive without her. He was just going to... exist, for a little while longer.

“ Make sure they get the notebook. I... I will owe you what you have done forever. If there's any justice after death, they'll... they'll take it all into account, and you'll end up somewhere nice.”

Hilda laughed. It would be the last laugh he would ever hear from her, and his mind was desperate to record it, but before it could the moment passed and she was speaking and he will never hear her laugh again. What has he done?

“ Claude, there is no justice, not here and not afterwards, and we both know it. There's just _us_. Fodlan had a Goddess once, and we killed her. So it's up to us. For a better tomorrow, the way Nemesis put it on his tombstone- remember? For a better future. Keep that in mind, okay? You told all of us, and we all agreed to it, Claude. We all knew what this would cost us, at day's end. You're the leader, Claude; and I have _never _regretted my service to you.”

There is nothing more to say, so Claude does her the honor of crying for her, openly sobbing, and she bowed to him, to show she understood just what it meant for him to be so honest with her, what a gift it was.

Claude must lie so much: to Seiros, who dreamed him a loyal servant; to Fodlan, who thinks of him as a villain and a monster (and to be fair, he has managed to earn both titles fairly enough). To himself, when he pretends this does not hurt him, so he can continue to do what needs to be done.

Genuine honesty from Claude is the most precious treasure he has to give; and she recognized the value of it as he handed it to her, bows once more... and walked away.

Her journey was to a cell, one of the few in the underground base that was close to the surface. It was a lonely place, for the most lost Deer, for the one Deer that was even more gone than Leonie, who had disappeared a full four years prior, unable to stomach the plan anymore, despite her belief in it.

Hilda wished her well. They had missed her support, but at least Leonie had kept her mouth shut, and so Seiros was still unaware of the truth of things. The last she'd heard, a woman matching Leonie's description had been heading north, but there was nothing there but some tiny village, named after a Saint- probably trying to curry Church favor, back in the days when that meant anything.

Whatever she was doing, Hilda wished her well, as she drew up before the cell that held Lysithea. Four eyes stared at her from the cage's darkness, bright purple alternating with brilliant pink. They'd originally kept the cavern lit up, but Lysithea's eyes did not like the light anymore, and so at her request they had darkened the room.

That had been back when she'd spoken more often. These days, it was mostly growls from her twin throats, when she deigned to respond verbally at all. What was left of the last meal she'd managed to gulp down her twisted mouths lay scattered on the floor, and Lysithea had savaged it so badly that one of the wyvern's legs had slid out of the cage, to lay against the far wall.

Hilda didn't know _why _Lysithea had demanded live wyverns for food, back in the day, but she'd never voiced an objection since, so they kept feeding them to her. Maybe she liked eating something that tried to fight back. At least her transformation had destroyed her ability to taste anything, so that the sweets-loving girl cared not what she had.

“ Ready, Lysithea?” Hilda asked. Some days, Lysithea could not answer- more days, recently- and Hilda would wait, wait until it was Lysithea in there again, and not the bestial urges that replaced her on too many days. She did not fear Lysithea, precisely, but there was no need to take additional risks.

But today is a good day. Lysithea's voice in stereo comes to her, slurred by the changes in her wide grin.

“ Is it time for another hunt, Hilda?”

“ Time for the last hunt, Lysithea,” Hilda said, quietly. No one came down here, but no reason to risk the dream by carelessness. These tunnels echoed.

Lysithea chuckled, one mouth a little ahead of the other. She echoed now, too.

“ Then I have lived to see it after all, despite... everything,” Lysithea said, with great satisfaction... but her tone turned plaintive, worried. “ You... you're not lying to me, are you, Hilda? If you have to put me down, I understand- I haven't been myself very much, recently- I'm forgetting things, but I still remember the dream, I remember Garreg Mach, I remember our promise. So if you have to put me down, just... just tell me, don't lie to me that I got to play a part in the final chapter of Claude's scheme. Don't lie to me.”

“ I would never lie to you about this,” Hilda said, reaching a hand out and into the bars. “ You're a Deer, too, Lysithea, even now. Fear the Deer, remember?”

A rough claw, the size of Hilda's entire body, reached out from the black. Purple and black, flecked with static, each long finger tipped with a deadly claw, and as it approached the dust in the air transformed, warped into new shapes by Lysithea's mere presence.

A single fat talon stroked gently against Hilda's outstretched palm.

“ Fear the Deer,” Lysithea intoned, and chuckled again. “ Fear the Deer. To think, that summarizes Claude's entire plan. Only Claude could take a schoolyard chant and manage to draw from it a plan to remake the entire world. Sometimes, I think I'm dreaming, when I think of the plan...”

Hilda chuckled with her as she withdrew her hand, but Lysithea kept going, her tone turning... wondering.

“ The last time I went under... I dreamed again, Hilda. But it wasn't about the empty man and his ice dragon children, or the silent dragon's spawn, or... or any of the other things I've seen, the green-haired woman and her beautiful sword, that big man with his greatsword and his mage husband. I... I dreamt of us, Hilda.”

“ What did you see?” Hilda asked, Lysithea's tone worrying her. Lysithea had shared a few of her dreams before- the ones that were most consistent- but she had never described them as anything but fantasies before, and never had she dreamt of anyone real.

“ I saw... I saw a Fodlan, Hilda, where _Edelgard _launched this war, but she was less honest than us, she genuinely thought the death was worth it, if she could control it all. I saw a Fodlan where Dimitri went mad, Hilda, where the Tragedy was not of Brigid but of Duscur, black skin sticky with red blood, Dimitri turned savage, Hilda, worse than I am even at my lowest. I saw a Fodlan where Claude was... he was a _hero_, Hilda, he wanted only to learn the truth and save people, he was a beautiful breeze that blew new life and growth into everything he ruled over. Byleth stood with him and he shone like the sun and... and...”

She choked, both throats clenching tight as she stifled a sob.

“ We were _all _heroes, Hilda. All of us. We had beautiful crowns of golden antlers and we were all kings and queens, Hilda, we were kings and queens and _nobody_ could take that from us. We saved the _world_, Hilda. We went down in history as heroes.”

A tear slipped out of Hilda's eye, and she wiped it away, surprised and stunned. She had not cried in...

“ I wept, too, Hilda,” Lysithea said. “ When I woke up, and I was this. I had a smile on my face and ribbons in my hair and I was shaped right, Hilda, I was myself again...”

“ Another life, maybe,” Hilda said, flicking the tear away, still surprised that Lyisthea's words would affect her so. In a fairy tale, that tear would have been magic, the lone tear cried by the terrible villainess; but this was life, and the Deer were honest with themselves about who they were, and what they did. “ In another world, in another place, in another time... but we are here, Lysithea.”

“ Aye, we are,” came the reply, and Lysithea's rough talon reached out through the bars and nicked the key off the nearby wall. The cell was not designed so that Lysithea could not open it; it was designed to restrain the basic instincts that took over when she was dreaming, when she was not there and only hunger and need ruled. The beast was too stupid to figure out how the locks worked; Lysithea, sensible, sane, was able to open the three locks in a moment, and Hilda stepped back as the door swung open.

Lysithea emerged into the light.

Hands as big as a human torso- four of them, two on each arm, where her body had tried to split and failed. They separated at the elbow, so that her twin shoulders bore four arms at their ends. The second hand on each arm was attached to long, leathery wings that spread yards in length, their other end attached to the bottom of her ribs, themselves part of a long, slender form that dwarfed some of the smaller dragons with its length. Scaleless flesh that was raw purple and wet black, leading back to legs and feet that had not quite managed to separate the way the arms had, so that each backfoot had two dewclaws and ten talons, dual kneecaps cracking and popping with each movement. Her tail forked at its end, the immense hammers of bone on their ends that marked her craft dragon heritage a dual-thing so heavy and thick it could smash apart men and horses and stone walls alike.

But it was her heads that drew the eye most. Her dual Crests had reacted poorly to the transformation; the process had tried to make _two _Hierophants out of Lysithea, two different types of dragon, and everything had went wrong. At the end of a long, wide neck sat two faces, one larger, one smaller, that had not _quite _separated; the larger, marked by her major crest of Gloucester, looked most like she once had, save that only her right-most eye retained its normal coloring.

But that face's left side led to its twin, marked by her minor crest of Charon, and it made fewer pretenses of normality. That smaller face had mismatched eyes too, for when it had formed, it had taken Lysithea's left eye with it, and when the new eyes formed, they did not have her original color, but a sort of strange purple to them. The two heads shared a mouth, wide and full of jagged teeth- and their closest eyes, the new ones, they were almost connected, their twin sockets had a depression between them like a runny channel, as though when the second head had formed and one eye had traveled over, it had carved a groove between Lysithea's two skulls.

Lysithea's hair, still white from the experiments, stretched out in a wild tangle between the two skulls, tried to grow over the split too, ending up forming something that wasn't quite a mane and wasn't quite a hairstyle but had elements of both.

Hilda wasn't sure how Lyisthea's brain had managed to survive any of that, or if she had two brains or what- she was just glad that Lysithea was still present, here at the end, the way she had promised to be five years ago.

“ Where does the plan require us to die, my friend?” Lysithea asked her, as Hilda went to a nearby closet and withdrew from it a saddle.

“ Enbarr,” Hilda said, as she brought over a bag containing the tools she'd need. Brushes for Lysithea's hair- she hated tangles, and she liked the sensation. Scrubbing sponges and soaps and treatments for her flesh- Adrestian weather was hotter than Lysithea liked, and she'd get sores if Hilda wasn't careful. Riding gear, for herself, and the straps and buckles that would keep the saddle on Lysithea's back even mid-flight.

“ Then... it was Edelgard, after all?” Lysithea queried as Hilda, on a whim- and remembering the dream- grabbed a few spare ribbons from the closet, ribbons once intended to hold her own hair together, that would serve in Lysithea's hair as well. “ Not Dimitri?”

“ Yep. Claude's finally come around,” Hilda announced. “ Dimitri's trying a fool's gamble down south, and so Claude's given up on him being the one. But Edelgard- her and her Eagles have not only evaded us when we've _actually _been trying to kill them, and not just playing with them like we've been doing with Faerghus, but they recently just shut down our attempt to take Arianrhod. They're almost certainly on their way to Gronder Field now. They'll take it, and current best projection is that they'll come roaring back to Enbarr with a combined army.”

“ The Great Bridge of Myrddin might be a target as well,” Lysithea rumbled, as Hilda strapped the saddle to her. Despite everything, she was still the smartest of the Deer, when her mind was her own. Her words reverberated through her skin, and her cold flesh buzzed against Hilda. “ Does Lorenz know that it's Edelgard, and not Dimitri?”

“ I informed him myself,” Hilda said. “ He's ready with the 'accident', should we be wrong and Edelgard go for the bridge first.”

“ Good. But... she will _have _to take Enbarr at some point, regardless of whether she tries to establish a foothold first or immediately turns around to free Adrestia,” Lysithea mused. Hilda did one last check and stood up, the saddle cinched and ready to go, her stuff packed in the saddlebags. “ So we go there, to ensure that this story has a proper fight at such a climactic point. I wonder how they'll play us off, in theaters of the future.”

“ I'm hot and you're scary, so I'll be played like I was a sexpot and you'll be played up as the actual threat between the two of us, so don't worry! We're in no danger of being remembered accurately by anyone,” Hilda said with a laugh, and Lysithea joined in as Hilda hopped on.

“ Alright,” Hilda said, grabbing the handles before her. Lysithea needed no reins. “ let's get going. For a better future.”

“ For a better future,” Lysithea echoed, and crawled down the tunnel to its opening, whereupon she spread her wings and took flight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my God, this just keeps getting BIGGER. Two more chapters til the end, I think. Holy shit.


	4. As We Came Together at Last

**As We Came Together at Last**

Claude stares at the potion he has made, this... concoction. It simmers, it whispers, it is _alive _in some way, not so much an elixir as... a doorway. He sees a pool of infinite black in that swirling mix, and it looks back and sees him, too.

It is almost time for the final battle. He shall not be found wanting, when it is time to reveal true colors, and show his tormentor what her torments have cost her. He has never forgotten a single one of her cruelties, and he will pay them back with interest.

( The dark, Rhea's eyes above his, reptilian slits as she moved scalpels to make slits in him, too. The way the others screamed. The way his mother and father screamed, the first people taken for Seiros' experiments, to see if there was potential in their family at all... his father, a King, his mother a runaway bride of Riegan, neither should have had this happen to them, but in Almyra, Rhea is the voice of the Goddess, and when she called for them to come, come they had.)

He has asked so many sacrifices of the others. He has asked them to throw away their honor, their reputation, their lives and their dreams, he has asked them to be damned by all humanity for all time, villains of history... all to chase his dream, _the _dream, the goal Sothis and Nemesis and Cethleann and all history's greatest heroes have held sacred, the one dream so big that, someday, they might yet manage to make it real.

He will never be able to forget the day they promised, that they all agreed to help him, the day when he pulled off his mask and stood there, bare, just himself, near tears, and told them what he was doing, and why. Why the theatrics; why the Storm Caller- and Goddess above, he hated it, he _hated _it, he can still see Jeralt dying and Remire dying and he is a _monster_, Seiros did not make him a monster in the dark but Remire did. He can still remember Byleth's fury at their last meeting, Byleth, who alone of all the world he has ever loved. Who saved him from his own hired goons- how ridiculous is that?

She saved him, and he'd.. he'd always... it had lit some fire in him, that he'd tried so hard to squash. They'd talked. At the monastery, where his days had been so sweet, pretending to be just a schoolboy with a crush. Days spent engaging in schoolyard play, and watching her, who the world found emotionless, who he merely found beautiful, and intriguing.

Days of joy that bled into nights of horror, the mask heavy on his face, nights spent planning how to fulfill Rhea's goals without giving her too much strength, and attempting to kill the Black Eagles- a task he failed at, and not for lack of trying.

After all, at the time he had thought it was Dimitri who would rise as the great hero to his terrible villain, convinced by his heroic charm and steadfast faith... and one other thing. Some part of him had feared... bias, towards Byleth, had feared that his desire for her would get in the way of his great scheme, that he had been planning since he stood over his parent's unmarked graves and heard Seiros praise them as necessary sacrifices for the cause.

So he had chosen to kill the Eagles, so that the Lions could become the focus of the tale, the great heroes of the story.

But... Hilda had been right. Even back then, Hilda, who alone of his Golden Deer had known beforehand who and what he was, had seen something in Edelgard and Byleth both, had told him it would be them... and now, half a decade later, Edelgard and Byleth were proving Hilda wise. She'd mocked him for it, a little bit, in her friendly way.

And now she was gone. Her and Lysithea were gone and he would never see them again, never speak to them again...

A few tears try to sting his eyes, and with all the terrible willpower he has gathered in his short, desperate life, he pushes them back. He steadies himself. He gave Hilda his tears, the same way he wept for Lysithea and Marianne when he saw what Rhea had done to them, the way he will mourn Lorenz when he dies defending Derdriu and Ignatz when the transformation is complete. These tears, they are not for him, they are for these heroes who surround him, who choose, impossibly, to trust in him, who promises them only death and damnation.

He has no right to any sorrow for himself, not after what he had done. He has always known this would make a monster of him, and he does not, he _will _not, dishonor the dead, he will not make mockery of the sacrifices he has forced others to make by weeping for himself. He is not Rhea. For Hilda, for his Golden Deer, who die that the world might be remade, he will weep. He will not weep for himself.

He will be an honest man. He knows that it is his hands that clench tight the world's throat; every terrible thing the Alliance and Almyra do is on him, for all that Rhea desires it too. He has enabled her, after all. He will not deny that, and he will not deny the world the right to kill him for it. When the Black Eagles- and they are so beautiful, the Eagles have become so incredible, the army of all the world that he had envisioned when he began all this- come to kill him, he will resist only enough that the play can have a proper ending.

That is _his _sacrifice. He will not escape, either. The Golden Deer have, between them, only a _single _point of honor: they are faithful to the plan. Even unto death.

And this potion... this is part of it. Rhea has to die, first. The hatred the people will bear for the Nabataea will be too much, if a dragon is to blame for all this, at day's end; better it be him, a traitorous human. An evil, monstrous human. Let Rhea go down as merely another monster, one eventually slain by Claude himself; let the burden of history's hate fall on him. Let his name become a byword for evil, let his face echo down history with a demon's smirk.

But, to do that, he must kill Rhea, and that's a tall order. The potion is the answer, something he has worked on for five years with all his knowledge of poisons and chemistry and alchemy. A thing of darkness, elemental night, to counter the divine dragon that is Rhea... a form she cannot reclaim, he knows now. He doesn't have to kill a dragon, just Rhea in human skin- a deadly warrior, but he can overcome her. Between his wyvern and this potion...

He'll have to kill Alois too. Her faithful servant, first of her Hierophants, dredged up from... somewhere. He's not sure where. Faithful to her. Not like Marianne and Ignatz, who only pretend subservience, who are somehow still themselves, even with Rhea's voice rolling like thunder in the back of their skulls. Alois is truly Rhea's creature, and Claude will need strength to overcome the burning thing he has become.

Hence this jar of night he has constructed, that he must take inside himself in small doses, so that he will survive it. Something that will make him a little more, not stripping him of his humanity, precisely... so many, even before Rhea, had tried that, had claimed the little half-blood mongrel wasn't _real _people, that he cannot stomach the idea of transforming himself fully.

But this potion won't do that. It will simply grant him great powers of darkness, if he's brewed it right. It will add a homunculus' energy to his own, make him a thing of night- he'd based it on Solon's notes, which he'd stolen from Garreg Mach the day before he'd went down into the Tomb and had his mask shattered by Aymr. He had not _dared _let Rhea get her hands on those plans, and he had stored them in the once place she wouldn't look- his laboratory here, in the Dragon's Lair, not a hundred feet from Rhea's throne.

It was why he'd killed Solon, slipping a poison onto one of Rhea's blades, so that, when she cut him during torture, a week later, he died of a heart attack. Whatever the man knew remained locked in his silenced throat, and Rhea would never know it, no matter how furious she was at the death, no matter how she pummeled Claude afterwards.

( She had not beat him because she knew about the poison- if she had, she'd have killed him- she had merely struck him because she could. Claude's resilient body took more punishment than most did, and she had enjoyed clawing his toughened skin. Not the first time. Not the last.)

Homunculus... like Byleth. Not quite like Byleth, who was also part dead goddess... maybe that was what he was attracted to, inside her. That chunk of the goddess, who was good, or so he'd read. Maybe he just wanted to know that there was someone, somewhere, who would look upon the world and try to fix it, a god somewhere who could... who could forgive his Deer their sins, that they commit in his name. He is not worried for himself, not really; call him a devil and damn him for it, that is fair enough. Should a Hell exist, and he burn there, he will not be able to contest the charge.

But he likes the idea, that some spirit of divinity could look at his Deer, see what they have done... and forgive them, and grant them peace. Or, at least, put their sins on his shoulders, let him bear the weight he has forced them to carry for so long, and let them walk away unburdened and free.

He takes a drink. The potion is thick and rich, tastes of dark chocolate and blood and the whispers of the dreaming dead, and so cold; he can trace it down his throat, it does not burn a path but freezes one.

He wishes the potion hurt. It doesn't. It feels... calming. Quiet. It feels comforting, like a wet rag pressed to a fevered forehead, or the way your pillow felt against your tired and sleepy head after a long and stressful day. It feels kind of... good, to him, who is surrounded forever by shining gold and stark white, to drink down this elemental blackness and feel it spread throughout his skin, a promise that, when time comes, the night will be at his side.

He wishes it hurt. Every time he takes a drink, he prays that this time, it is different. He feels like, if this hurt, it would be... penance of a kind. A sacrifice on his part, who demands so many sacrifices from the others.

But it does not hurt his body, and so it instead torments his mind and his soul, with the knowledge that he is comfortable when his own are about to suffer so, and his sleep is awash with terrible nightmares of Rhea's eyes.

-

Somewhere in Adrestia, Macuil hunts.

The great dragon soars over the land, hunting a small group who have taken up raiding. He is not sure what they are doing; fighting the Alliance forces in the area, he thinks, from the snatches of conversation his sensitive ears catch as he soars over the land. He hears whispers of words he knows and hates; 'descendant of Agartha', 'Church of the Spirit', 'Adrestia'.

'Human.' The word he despises most.

He catches them, eventually. Pathetic beasts. The gathering is of a large group of humans, but they have almost no equipment, just a few scattered spears and stolen things from the Alliance, hastily repainted with dabs of muddy ochre. They are led by a woman who has smeared black wings onto the back of her tabard in some ash-based paint, and one of them holds up a hand-painted banner smeared with dirt- a black eagle, flying proud.

Black Eagles. Now _that _is a set of words Macuil hates, almost as much as he hates the word 'human'. Black Eagles. Black Eagles on the lips of every godless human he hunts, Black Eagles painted in every town and every wall, Black Eagles, Black Eagles, Black Eagles. How he hates those words! An idiot's incantation, something these mindless humans believe in so much they are willing to die for it, a prayer that they hope will stop their proper masters from doing with them as they will.

But if that was all, well, he would not care so much. Humans have always prayed in his presence, mostly for whatever imaginary gods they believe in to save them from Macuil's torments, and none of those gods have ever answered in any way.

No, he hates the word for more than it being so common on the lips of humans he is about to kill. He hates it for being a phrase he has heard, impossibly, on his _brethren's_ lips, and more than once. He hates it for stealing some of his kin from him, for the strange power it seems to have, that dragons- who should know better!- leave, sometimes, in the dead of night, chasing those words to something only they can see. He has killed some of them, and the look in their eyes he saw, before the end... it scares him, though he has never admitted it to anyone else.

( He does not know that he sees in their eyes what they see, when they fly from the service of monstrosity to the service of good; it is the fabled horizon, the promise that tomorrow can be better, if you are willing to fight for today, a power that humanity and Nabatea both can only call hope. That is the power that frightens Macuil, whose dreams include no hope, who cannot stand the sight of it in the eyes of those of his people who do not merely walk away from Omelas, but turn around and besiege the gates.)

He lands, expecting them to run, expecting to have his fun chasing them- but she turns, this would-be leader, and her makeshift army with her, and in her hands are two blades of ancient Agarthan steel.

“ Run,” he rumbles to them, because it is _always _more fun when they don't fight back. “ Run, and scream.”

“ Fuck you!” the woman yells, and takes off at a run towards him. “ For the Emperor! For Edelgard!”

They charge with her, these humans- more of those damned words on their lips, as the charging men and women shouted out words of allegiance to the Black Eagles, giving these mere mortals the courage to charge a dragon. Macuil would admire it, if he was willing to give humans credit for anything; as it was, he despised them too much to do so, and he merely sighed. Battle with such peons was a chore more than a delight; he'd have to struggle not to fall asleep.

The “battle” was a matter of moments. But they kept coming, even until the end, and the woman in the lead, who he heard one of the others call something during the fight- Kronus? Ronya? Bah, names were a human thing, he did not care for them- who did have the Agarthan look about her, was alive until the end, dodging and moving with practiced grace.

“ I'll kill you!” she bellowed, dodging his lazy claw swipes. He resisted the urge to yawn. He preferred it when they ran- it was fun, to chase down prey, if for no other reason than because he liked stretching the game out a little. Sitting down and doing this was just... dull. She'd tire soon enough, and then his hands would catch her and this would be over.

Dull work, this, providing support for Seiros' human pawns; but Seiros had been right, all those years ago, and she was still right now. Macuil would serve her, the Goddess' favored daughter. And, well, humans made useful pets, Macuil supposed, though he could not stomach their presence at all.

He idly pondered if he could convince Seiros to let him set up a hunting range somewhere, when they owned all the world, a place to let humans run free for a time before he came to run them down. That would be _very_ fun, and he pondered the possibilities.

Thus distracted, he did not see the woman come up with an idea- see her look at his neck and at his idly flapping wings.

She is off like a shot, dodging _under _his claws, leaping up to his left wing, and as he squawked in surprise, flaring his wings out, she leapt with the momentum he had granted her, swords turned around to hold reverse-style in her fists, and she leapt to plunge them into his neck.

His scales prove too strong, the way they always do. Even her ancient Agarthan blades cannot fully penetrate; she scores his scales deeply, though, as she slides down them, and when the blades finally catch on the jagged edge of one scale low down on his neck, the weight of her fall partially dislodges it.

He grabs her up, enraged. That had _hurt_.

“ For Adrestia,” she spits at him, as he holds her in his fist.

He spends the next hour killing her. He is cruel, he is slow, and when he is done, the last sound on her lips is not some paean of loyalty, but merely tormented screams. It exhausts his anger- mostly at himself. He was getting lazy.

He tapped the scale. Loose; it'd take weeks to regrow. And a bad spot for a loose scale, too, right over the thick vein that pumped blood up his neck to his head... he'd have to be careful, in the future.

Not that such injuries were common. This wouldn't have happened at all if he'd been paying attention. Ah, well. A reminder not to be so slothful in the future; shame that there wasn't much to do about a loose scale. He'd just have to be careful of it, until a new one grew in under it.

Thus thinking, he lifted off from the bloody plains, to see what new prey Seiros wanted him to hunt.

-

The Eagles move, flying as fast as their wings can go. Pack animals are laden with what few things they need, equipment cleaned on the move, and supplies made ready for war even as their feet beat out a steady march. These are the little details that bedevil the rebellion, but the Eagles have been at war for a long time- they know exorcisms for these tasks, little tricks that make the work just a little easier, and off they march, as Edelgard ponders where the next great battle will take place.

Gronder Field, where so much had been decided in the past, and where so much will be decided now. Edelgard's rebellion lasts because Faerghus distracts the Alliance, absorbs most of the weight of its blows; without Dimitri, Faerghus will fall, and without Faerghus the Eagles will be hooded and caged, contained, killed. Without the Lion, the Eagle will fall.

And if Adrestia's last hope for revival does not arrive in time, then Faerghus is destined to lose at Gronder Field; Edelgard knows this, knows the disposition of the Alliance troops better than Dimitri had when he set out, and she knows that Dimitri is outnumbered too badly to win. He cannot overcome all the forces in the area. Without the Eagle, the Lion will fall.

Neither can survive without the other. Two nations, doomed to die when the other does. This war has, finally, made brother and sister out of her and Dimitri, as it has made their two nations siblings, one again, the way they were once before, in the time when Faerghus had not yet fled the Empire. To save her nation, she must save his; to save his nation, she must save him now, as his very presence has saved her, all these long years, a shield to prevent Claude from committing all his forces to the hunt for her.

Payment, perhaps, for her saving him, all those years ago- an endless cycle they are caught in, her and Dimitri, not of revenge but of rescue, each saving the other in turn.

A silly thought. Life was not like that. There was no... plan, no destiny.

But... it would be beautiful, if it were true. It would be nice to believe in. And if they _are_ caught in such a cycle, then it's her turn, now, isn't it? Her turn to save him- and she will. She will not fail him.

She chooses... to believe.

(A fire inside her, a fire that burns- but the fire warms cold bones, too, even as it singes her skin. Perhaps she should let it set her ablaze; it will hurt, but the look on Flayn's face when she had spoken to her with a fiery tongue is still in her head, the way the others had... _hoped_. They want the old Edelgard back. Perhaps she is still in there, somewhere, lost in the ashes, waiting to come back to life like a phoenix... perhaps it will be worth the pain, to care again, to care so much and burn so badly. Maybe it will be worth it.)

So to Gronder Field they go, as Edelgard's soul began to catch fire, where, long ago, she had won a mock battle with Byleth's able help and her fellow students.

Byleth was at her side again, and while this will be no mock battle, her soldiers are not students anymore either; they are legends in their time. And they have Flayn now, Saint Cethleann returned, and all the dragons at her command; they are more prepared for this than the enemy can know.

She will win this battle again. She will save him. Things are not so different as they were before.

Only Petra is missing, but her ghost- the only one that stayed in the ashes with her, as faithful in death as in life- smiles at her, at the Edelgard who is finally, after all these years, beginning to awaken.

( Dorothea glances at her, sees the determination on her face- sees the way Edelgard wrestles with her own desire to go quiet inside- and wonders if the woman that, for a little while, she had come to love is returning to her.)

-

To get to Gronder Field in time would be impossible for most armies, starting at the distance they do; but the Black Eagles are not most armies. If anyone can do it, it's them; and so in hopes of saving the Lion, the Eagle take off, straight as the crow flies, following their mortician kin. They are traveling for the next few days to Gronder Field, hoping to catch up with the sluggish juggernaut of Dimitri's great pride of Lions, before it manages to slam into the already entrenched forces of the Deer.

And a straight flight it is; not just tricks of travel do they know, this army of rebels and legends, but the land, too. They know this land that they have defended for half a decade better than anyone, know secret paths they have found or made with their own feet. It lets them cross Adrestia faster than any save perhaps Claude himself would believe, and even he would be surprised at the advantages their unique composition grants them, the ways around obstacles other armies do not have that, for the Eagles, are standard practice.

The combined arms of the Eagles means that what would be the work of days can be completed in hours; no terrain is difficult for them to master. Flying dragons carry their human allies and their supplies across deep valleys between mountains, no need to descend or ascend either side. Swimming dragons ferry supplies and soldiers over rivers, eliminating the need to look for bridges or low crossings. Cavalry and caravans carry the exhausted manaketes, so that, instead of stopping for rest, the manaketes can simply sleep on the move, restoring their energy for the battle to come without pausing the march. Mages sweep away deep drifts of sand and raise solid ground in deep bogs with magic so that horsemen and wagons might cross without getting mired. Hardy mountaineers and mighty soldiers hack paths through deep forest that would entangle less athletic and more bookish souls, and keep them off more recorded paths that others might expect them to be on. Even former smugglers and brigands are valuable, for they know places that Alliance patrols rarely venture, and can lead their comrades safely past golden watchmen without raising alarm.

Because each people of the world have contributed in some way to Edelgard's forces, she has found over the years that she always has someone, somewhere, who knows a way out of whatever predicament they manage to find themselves in, and she has taught herself to listen. This wisdom creates a relentless momentum, a reckless charge across her occupied country that, somehow, proves to be perfectly safe; the Eagles descend deep into trackless, unmapped forest, cross traveler-devouring bogs, journey up steep mountains with thin passes, and travel audaciously directly across the paths of Allied armies, and it is all done without the loss of a single soldier and without the Alliance being any the wiser, despite the near-frantic speed with which they move.

And so it is that, despite being the last to hear of the battle to come, and starting farther away from it than any of the others, the great flock of Black Eagles are the first to arrive at Gronder Field, managing to get there two days before the others will arrive, and with no one unaccounted for. They haven't even lost much equipment, just a few spare things in a single wagon that broke down and had to be torched and left behind, nothing that will be missed much.

Still, for how amazing the feat is, two days only are they early. The Deer are already nearby, as are the Kingdom army, and there is so little time to prepare, to make plans. The Eagles are so few, despite all the skill and expertise of even the least of their number, that they must make plans, use tricks, to make up for their smallness, to punch above their weight class. Two days is not much time.

But it is time, regardless, and the Eagles, no matter the situation, never give up. They have not given up for five long years, they still believe in the dream of restoring Edelgard to her throne and Adrestia to the world, and now is no time to give up on such a long-cherished goal.

Today is not the day they fail their people, a word that has grown to encompass all the world.

So they make ready, so that when time comes, the bonds of the Eagle and the Lion might yet prove enough to throw back the Deer.

-

When the armies arrive, the Eagles observe them both. The Kingdom army is huge, everything Dimitri could put into it, a desperate gamble; row after row of knights, mages of Fhirdiad, and every warrior the Church of the Spirit had left, alongside two great companies of Duscur, axes shining in the sun. The Kingdom Grand Army, they'd heard it called in whispers along the way, and it surely is; a traditional Kingdom army in its makeup, mostly cavalry, a few mages, only the Church soldiers add anything new or unique to it, and they appeared to mostly be healers.

Dimitri they found moving among the troops, and from time to time they spotted people they knew, former students, both common soldiers and those who had been part of the Officer's Class... but what they were looking for was morale, and it appeared that Dimitri had the loyalty and full unity of his entire army. No one looked likely to break or run, and all seemed in awe of Dimitri's mere presence.

( At one point, Edelgard saw Petra among them, a flash of purple hair in the sunlight- and ignored it. Petra was the last of her ghosts, and it did not surprise her that she might find her in a spyglass. Hubert saw her once, too, but when he looked again, she was gone, and he was able to convince himself that he'd just seen a lookalike... and in an army this size, finding one specific person was difficult. Despite him being ever-present, for example, they never saw Sylvain, because his unit was on the other side from them.)

So... as a whole, the army was loyal, mobile, and powerful, and those only wounded and not killed could be restored so they could rejoin the fight, giving it sustaining power on the march and the attack both... but it was too specialized, vulnerable to specific tactics, and poorly suited for taking cities. An army half its size that was all spearmen could tear it to pieces, with only the proud soldiers of Duscur able to contest them.

What would it do if it had to take a city? Even a small stone wall would be a huge stumbling block to this army of horsemen; the Eagles saw few siege weapons among them, and cavalry cannot take a city unless someone else brings the walls down for them. Unless Dimitri planned to have the Duscur deal with all those problems themselves, he had no answer for them, and the Duscur were too few to handle all those duties by their lonesome.

They didn't have dragons, either, which the Eagles used as replacements for siege weapons, which were too bulky for rebels to take along... all except the ballistae they'd spent the last day setting up, which were easily stripped down for travel, and too useful not to keep, staying tucked under the wagons when not in use.

Still, it wasn't Dimitri's fault that his culture produced monolithic armies. He'd tried to supplement his weaknesses, had drawn from the Church and from Duscur for more options. You can't change a culture in a day, and like all of them but Claude, he'd went to war not with the army he would have made, but with the army he had, unprepared and ambushed.

For all its flaws, the Kingdom had held out for five years, whereas the Empire had fallen in one, and that was worthy of the deepest respect.

The Alliance Army was nearly as specialized, but was also much more fractious; the commander turned out to be Lorenz, the boy most of the female Eagles remembered with thoughts of disgust had grown into a man at last. On a whim, Edelgard checked his fingers, and confirmed to her listerners what she saw with some amusement- no ring. He was unmarried.

“ I knew it,” Dorothea proclaimed, and they all laughed.

Lorenz, who they'd always heard was no fool, seemed to be doing his best not to live up to that reputation. They hadn't fought him that often, it had been years since the wings of Eagles faced this particular whirlwind, but they did not remember him being this... careless. His army was enormous, admittedly, dwarfed even the Kingdom Grand Army; the Alliance had been the smallest of Fodlan's three nations, but it had also been relentlessly recruiting in the years leading up to the war, and its homeland had been unharmed in the war, allowing new troops to grow up in peace, to take the palce of the fallen.

Still, big as it was, it was almost all archers, which was common enough in the Alliance... but Lorenz had brought better than that to their previous matches, seemed fond of cavalry as a counterweight to a bow-heavy army, and had always favored a wiser combined-arms approach much more similar to the Black Eagles than to the standard Alliance fare. The troops weren't the most disciplined, either, and compared to their ramrod straight opposition, seemed almost slovenly; so arrogantly unconcerned that they barely made the effort to be presentable.

Of more concern was a relatively small pack of Almyran wyvern riders, who were _not _lacking in discipline, led by an unfortunately familiar sight, though it had been more than five years since they'd seen him; the Dragon Knight, in the full bloom of terror. Linhardt had been designated as his opponent, once again, the only person who had ever beaten him before, and the gentle healer had simply sighed and nodded. War was war, no matter that he had nightmares of his stained hands.

Dragons were there, too, but as the Eagles had seen before, they didn't listen to the human officials; dragons were above that, would do their own thing, which the Eagles had always been grateful for. The young dragons that were most of Seiros' followers were foolish and reckless, and had a nasty tendency to run out of formation... and straight to their deaths, either at the hands of the Eagles' own dragons, or mobbed by human soldiers.

( Or Caspar, who seemed determined to repeat his feat of dueling one to death. He hadn't managed it so far, kept getting assisted right before the end, but it wasn't for lack of trying... no matter how much Dorothea yelled at him for the needless risk.)

The same pattern would repeat today, it seemed, though Lorenz didn't make much of an attempt to corral the manaketes who strutted, proud as peacocks, before his army. Truth be told... Lorenz didn't seem to be making _any _attempt to corral his army. He rode among them, but it seemed almost... artificial. Like he was putting on a show.

The Eagles chewed that over. Maybe Lorenz was just really incompetent; but that didn't jive with their information or, worse, with their gut instincts, which said he was still the man they'd faced before. No amount of looking told them what was up with this unexpected foolishness, and for an army so dependent on information to keep up with its foes, it was nerve-wracking, watching this strutting parody of a theatrical villain.

What trick was he planning?

-

Lorenz looked over his forces, his mind running over the events of the past. He thought of the letters he'd written his paramours, the women he'd had his children with, and the letters and gifts he'd sent to the adoptive families of his children, the last bits of his family's treasury, spent for their futures.

It had started as his way to... forget. They all had their indulgences, among the Golden Deer, little ways and pleasures they used to keep functioning under the weight of Claude's grand scheme, to not think of their own impending, necessary deaths. Part of it was simply supporting each other; Lorenz, who had to kill his own father for his sins, had found new family with the others, and was grateful for it. The rest were in... hobbies. Hilda hunted down slavers with Lysithea's help. Marianne- before her transformation, anyway- had worked in field hospitals, Ignatz had painted. Lysithea, when not serving as Hilda's mount on hunts, read and dictated papers on magical theory to assistants, at least, when she was still Lysithea, and the beast was not in control- times that were coming fewer and fewer, these days.

Leonie had drank and brawled, releasing her tensions that way, but it had not proven enough, and so she had fled to some distant land... but she held to the promise, so Lorenz would think no ill of her.

He wasn't sure what Claude did; wrote in his little brown notebook, maybe. Or completed that poem he was writing to Byleth, that she would never see.

Lorenz, though... Lorenz used flesh to forget. Always willing flesh, of course, paid for properly; he was a monster, but not in that way, and he had no desire to add onto his sins. He was seeking comfort, not more things to have nightmares over.

That use occasionally produced children, as happened when certain genitals and certain other genitals became entirely too knowledgeable about each other over a long period of time. The medications healers used worked most of the time, but most was a thin word when you spread it out over five years. The women involved had different reactions. Two had even tried to flee, convinced Lorenz would murder them and their unborn child for the high crime of getting pregnant; they didn't get far. Lorenz ran a tight ship in his area of the Alliance, ever since he'd had his father executed for the murder of Raphael's parents, and he kept tabs on his favorite courtesans, the way a gourmet kept tabs on his favorite restaurants.

The women had been rather surprised that, rather than death, Lorenz offered them cash for the child- a considerable sum, enough that at least one he knew of had entered early retirement. The others remained in business, though they had become much friendlier with him during his visits.

Four children did he have, as far as he was aware, all being raised in areas well away from where any fighting would occur, all but one adopted by loving parents in various places- one by a pair of retired pegasus knights who, adventures in war over, sought the new adventure of being mothers; another by a pair of honest spice merchants wherein the wife had been rendered infertile by some illness years ago. The safest of his adoptees had ended up traveling out of the country with a Dagda businessman and his husband, as far from Fodlan's war as one could get.

The last belonged to the retired courtesan, who had wanted to raise the child herself; that was fine and fair enough, and so Lorenz had blessed her to take their son to a safe place he'd purchased, and granted her a hefty stipend in addition, which from his information she mostly used to buy, repair, and sell houses at a profit, being a bit of a carpenter in her spare time.

It was a comfort to him, to know he had children in the world. It meant something of him would survive, and Lorenz believed in legacy- which was why he sought to make sure none of his sons or daughters knew of him. House Gloucester had to die with him, this House, that had murdered innocent merchants for a moment's advantage, that was so ruthlessly greedy that it had seemed determined to prove Seiros' most deranged rantings of human evil true.

( He'd found out about Raphael's dead parents not two days before Claude revealed who he was to them, in the grounds surrounding Garreg Mach. Sometimes, Lorenz wondered what it would be like, if Claude had approached at any other time, if he hadn't known about the deaths on his father's hands before the Storm Caller pulled his mask off his face and was revealed before them as Claude. He had sworn the oath in a fit of rage, agreed to the plan because it seemed a way to redeem himself of his father's legacy... and while he still believed in it, sometimes, he wondered.)

But his children would live and grow, never knowing who their father was, untainted by his terrible legacy, by his service to Rhea, no matter that it was service designed to sabotage her great assault on humanity. Lorenz had done things he could not forgive himself for... but his offspring, whatsoever they decided to be, would not bear the weight of his sins on themselves.

Gold, and money, and books, and all the things they would need to not just survive, but thrive. The only father's gift he could give them that would not burden them- excepting secrecy, which he'd managed to do, hiding his children so well that neither Edelgard nor Rhea would ever find them.

He'd gotten so good at it that Ignatz, when time had come for him to play his final role and go to Rhea, so that she could make a Hierophant of him- and waste all that time, all those resources, making a Hierophant who, at day's end, was not loyal to her- had come to him, to hide his wife and children, though Lorenz had been surprised at who it was. He'd known Ignatz had a wife and kids... but for it to be Maya...

Well. Apparently Lorenz was not the only one who remembered the one Deer who, by the dumb luck of attracting Byleth's eyes, had never sworn their terrible oath.

Lorenz hopes that Maya is doing alright, with her three children, in the last place anyone would think to look- Enbarr, a particularly inspired idea, if Lorenz did say so himself. They'd be safe there, for who would look for Raphael's very sister in Enbarr- and if they did, who of Adrestia would harm the sister of a Black Eagle?

Thus is his duty to Ignatz as a fellow Deer complete. Little kindnesses like that were how they'd kept it together, despite everything.

Everything that they do... like planning their own soldier's deaths.

He looked over his troops again. Carefully designed, this army. As many archers as he could find, the core of any Alliance army, and as many dragons, too. The army was huge, much bigger than it needed to be, and for two reasons.

The first was theater; they needed an impressive victory, something to sell, to convince the coming armies that a treaty between them was worth it. If the two could defeat this great Alliance army by working together, then any commanders with any sense- and Edelgard and Dimitri both count, even if Edelgard was the wiser- would see the value in that, and continue in that vein. The Eagles were powerful, but they needed the Kingdom Grand Army for its numbers, and for the tasks that needed not skilled hands, but many hands- just as the Lions would need the Adrestian rebels for information, for their dragons, for their incredible skill. They went together well, they truly did, a dagger and a sledgehammer, each suited to a different task.

Lorenz took a moment to hope- prayer having fallen away from him over the years, as his atrocities mounted and he realized that any gods that did exist would be more likely to be coming _for _him than offering help _to _him- that Edelgard made it on time. Claude was confident of it, and Hilda more so, expressing such in their last conversation- which would be their _last _conversation, a strange thought to have, after so long as friends and family. Hilda would die in distant Enbarr, as Lorenz himself would die in Derdriu...

But he had no idea where the Black Eagles were. He had to trust in their well-deserved reputation as swift, secret warriors; had to hope that they were nearby, and ready, when time came.

But, assuming they were here, there was a second reason behind this army's makeup and size. That reason, of course, was simply that every Alliance soldier who died today was one who was not defending the Alliance in the future, and the Deer only had a little time to perform their sabotage; Rhea was sadistic, not stupid. They had to do as much damage as possible in their opening betrayal, or all the abomination of the last five years would be for naught. Rhea would catch on too quickly for there to be much time after the initial attack.

And it had to be a _lot _of damage. The Alliance army, added onto the Almyran army and Rhea's dragons, was a dominating force; this great beast of an army desperately needed whittling down. They would do what they could, but so much was still up in the air...

That was why the focus on archers. The heart of any Alliance army was its archers, and those that died today would fire no more arrows in the future. Archers, and dragons, who bred and grew so slowly. Future Alliance armies would be gutted before they were ever made.

Still, nothing was certain, and the scheme was at its most fragile point right now, right here at the end, so Lorenz had pulled out all the stops. For the last few weeks, Lorenz had put all his considerable talent into making sure that this army was weaker than it looked, corroding this great golden fist so that it was hollow inside. Equipment manifests were filed incorrectly, to make sure that there wasn't _quite _enough to go around, be that arrows or vulneraries or shoes. Reports from subordinates were dismissed or burned or discarded. Communication with neighboring armies had fallen off. Even the most basic lifeblood of an army, discipline, had been lax, and all on purpose; Lorenz had sent his most talented officers off on other missions, saving those he imprisoned on false charges, promoting a great many underlings in the last few weeks who were suddenly elevated beyond their means and rendered incompetent by the sudden transition.

He'd spread liquor among the human troops- “straight from the commander!” the officers he'd handpicked for their foolishness had cheered, as they opened the casks and the men drank. A poison in those casks, one of Claude's little tricks. Nothing major, in case a few casks ended up in Kingdom or Imperial hands after the battle. Just... a little numbness, a little slowing, that would fade in a few days. A little less competent, a little weaker.

All these little things, to nudge them a bit further towards loss. He was trying to kill his own men, a truth that haunted him; and he was sorry. But the plan required sacrifice. He will make it up to everyone, in the end, he will sacrifice even himself for this victory; but first, this atrocity must be committed. It will, at least, be one of the last atrocities he ever commits.

There was also the matter of the devices Lorenz had installed in secret along the Great Bridge of Myrddin... but that was a later matter. The poison in _those _devices was not so harmless, was another of Claude's brilliant inventions, and the gas they would make would kill hundreds, but he must keep his mind focused on one massacre at a time.

(What a thought to have.)

The dragons he encouraged to rush out, praising their great power, and then he just has to sit back and let years of Rhea's preaching do their thing. Arrogantly self-assured, the dragons praise him for not trying to control them, preen and strut and talk of future victory, and he knew from long experience that he was going to get to watch all of them die very, very surprised.

He wasn't sure where Rhea kept getting these dragons. They were all... kids. A few centuries old, youthful as dragons saw things. Lorenz would feel worse about sending them to their deaths, except that he was a child soldier, too, they were all racist oppressors, and he wasn't entirely sure that dragons counted as children at all past a century or so. A hundred years should produce a more mature being, in Lorenz' opinion, even if their hormones kept them a bit hasty.

Cichol alone worried him, the man he had known as Seteth. Seteth knows he's more competent than this, and his own wyvern riders drank none of Lorenz's proffered liquor... but Seteth seemed distracted, too, and he did not question the disposition of the remaining forces. Good. If he could just stay unquestioning a little longer, than it would not matter.

Lorenz was ready, and would never be more ready, and so was about to give the order to attack after one last inspection.

Then the Goddess' ghost pissed in Lorenz' plans, because she had nothing better to do. Thick, fat wisps of white began to billow in even as the morning sun tried to rise above them, and soon enough, Gronder Field- the stage where this great clash of titans was supposed to happen- looked like a particularly fluffy cloud had decided to take a nap on it.

Lorenz swore. Damn the dead Goddess. A little longer was apparently going to mean a whole day... they couldn't fight in this fog. What was to be a dramatic clash between opposites would just devolve into a ridiculous three-way mess if they tried fighting in this fog. Worst case, the Eagles and the Kingdom would end up fighting _each other, _and that was the _last _thing Lorenz wanted. After today, they needed unity, brotherhood, closer ties, not bad blood and feuds.

This was meant to be a resounding victory for the heroes of this little play, not a confusing tangle of mixed-messages that no one could pull either hero nor villain out of.

“ Pull back,” Lorenz said. “ Not today.” The men did so, trusting in him, their great leader, who provided them liquor, and even Seteth and the dragons abided, content to wait.

They would attack tomorrow, if no fog obscured the battlefield, so that when the Lions and the Eagles can see each other, and commit all their attacks directly against his own forces.

-

“ Looks like they're pulling back,” Dorothea mused as she sat, camouflaged, in a tree overlooking Gronder Field, holding up her spyglass, a fascinating little invention someone in far-off Dagda had made. They'd picked up a few years ago from some red-headed shopkeeper, and they were worth more than gold to the Eagles, who survived on information. “ Must have seen the fog rolling in and not wanted to risk it- an Alliance army lives and dies by its archers, after all, and they need clear targets.”

“ Should we contact Dimitri?” Raphael asked Dorothea, from his hiding place nearby, her ever-present bodyguard. “ He'd probably appreciate having some help. Or knowing we're even here.”

“ It might also reveal where we are,” Dorothea said, lowering her spyglass to talk with Raphael. “ It's more important we surprise the Alliance than that we contact the Kingdom- if Cornelia's messengers arrived, they'll know us for friends, and if they see us hitting the Alliance, they'll know it regardless. Our reputation proceeds us... I hope. If the Kingdom decides to fight us, too, we'll just retreat- but I don't think Dimitri's that stupid.”

Raphael nodded, then pursed his lips. “ If the Alliance pulls back... won't the Kingdom army just keep going?”

This was why Dorothea brought Raphael along on missions like this; he saw the practical side of things. “ Dimitri's goal is to cross the Great Bridge of Myrddin, and his forces have a strong cavalry element, backed up by a small contingent of mages; this terrain's better for that kind of army than the Bridge is. He _wants _to fight here, so he won't move, hoping to provoke the Alliance into an assault.”

She raised her spyglass again, and frowned. “ What I can't figure out is why the Alliance army came here in the first place. The Great Bridge of Myrddin is almost impossible to take at all, and the terrain is all narrow chokepoints; it's perfect for archers, and that's what the Deer _do_. Why in the world would they come out here, to Gronder Field, when they have to _know _that the only thing that matters is whether Myrddin is still standing or not?”

Raphael shrugged. “ Maybe the leader's a fan of drama.”

Dorothea, surprised, turned to Raphael. “ Drama?”

“ Yeah. Gronder Field's where the Kingdom was born, right? Broke free of you guys. Same way we finally broke from the Kingdom years later... well, I mean, technically we rebelled against you guys first... wow, now that I think about it, the Alliance has always been kind of warlike,” Raphael mused. “ I always thought we were peaceful, up until recently, but I guess fighting everyone in Fodlan's almost a tradition now. Anyway... maybe the commander wants to make a show of it. Destroy the Kingdom's last great army at Gronder Field, and put an end to it at the very place where it was born.”

“ But that's...” Dorothea shook her head. “ Who in the world treats war like theater?”

“ Politicians and historians and storytellers,” Raphael answered simply, and that was so true that Dorothea could only respond with a nod of her head.

( Somewhere far away, Claude gets the strangest sense that someone is onto him, but the moment passes as he brews another draught of darkness to drink.)

-

“ War, tomorrow,” Caspar said to Linhardt, as they lay in their shared tent, covered in the pleasant sweat of lovemaking.

“ Aye,” Linhardt replied, shifting against him, and putting a kiss atop his forehead. Still taller, despite Caspar's own rapid growth spurt in the last five years.

Caspar laid there a few moments longer, letting the quiet sink in. The camp had settled down, everyone seeking rest before the war the dawn would bring, and taking comfort howsoever they chose. Flayn prayed, Annette read over her old notebooks looking for murderous inspiration, Dorothea hummed wordless tunes to herself to remember Manuela, whom all had assumed dead in the assault on Garreg Mach, all those years ago. Raphael ate a few of the snacks he carefully kept for such occasions, Bernadette tended her horse, Hubert and Ferdinand attempted to out-brood each other, and Edelgard cleaned her weapon and armor.

Only Byleth needed no comfort, merely keeping watch without need of little things. Byleth had no need to seek relaxation before battle; a benefit of her mostly emotionless state. Not a lot bothered her, so she had little need for a counterbalance.

( And in her strangeling skull, Byleth pondered what she was, what she was becoming, and that horrific feeling in her chest, whenever she pondered what Seiros was now, and what had to be done to her, and wondered where that sound like gentle sobbing was coming from.)

Caspar and Linhardt, meanwhile, did what soldier couples had done since time immemorial, and fucked.

“ It's weird,” Caspar whispered to Linhardt, awash in the timeless haze of sexual satisfaction. “ We've fought so many times... but this feels... bigger.”

“ It is,” Linhardt said, melancholy tainting his words as he pondered the bloodshed soon to come. “ Gronder Field... I don't think anything can happen here that isn't... well, bigger. More. Like the land itself has some hidden weight on history, so that things that are done here echo throughout time, are magnified in meaning... Tomorrow will be something big... a lot of people are going to die...”

“ I've never known what you saw in me,” Caspar blurted out, not sure where it was coming from, save the terror he felt at Linhardt's words that, if he did not say this now, he would _never _say it. “ I've never figured that out, you're so smart and I'm so damn dumb, a-and I love all this war, Goddess I love it so much, but it hurts you...”

Linhardt hugged him tight, as Caspar buried his face in Linhardt's chest.

“ Scared to die. Lot of stuff I wanna do,” Caspar admitted. “ I wanna be famous. I want to kill the biggest goddamn dragon in the world and hear people shout my name. I want to make it up to Brigid for the things my father did during the Tragedy. I want... hell, I kinda want to learn magic, even though I'm shit at it, seeing Annette pull all that fire out and drop it on Marianne was the coolest thing I've ever seen!”

Linhardt laughed softly at that, and so did Caspar, because this was _ridiculous_. He kissed Linhardt on his chest, right above where his heart pumped- his heart, which loved peace and hated war, had mercy enough in it even for his enemies.

“ I'm a bit scared, I guess,” Caspar admitted. Linhardt held him tighter.

“ It's normal,” the healer said. “ I've been scared for five years. Still alive, though. And I'm here if it gets to be too much.”

“ Marry me,” Caspar said, and what would have passed for a leaden joke at any other time underwent alchemy under the heavy cover of dreaming night, and turned into golden sincerity.

“ Yes,” Linhardt said. They lay there, just absorbing that, and both were relieved when their first instinct was just to hold each other tighter.

“ We'll make Flayn do it,” Caspar said, to his fiancee. “ She's a saint.”

“ Byleth's Goddess, though,” Linhardt replied, pondering as he stroked his fiancee's hair. “ She outranks her.”

“ They should rock-paper-scissors for the privilege,” Caspar answered, and they laugh again.

-

The day comes at last. No fog, clear blue sky... and a gigantic army of golden-clothed soldiers, ready and able to kill him. Dimitri closed his spyglass with a sigh. When he'd bought it from that red-haired merchant woman, he hadn't expected it to throw his own death into such stark relief for him.

Turning, Dimitri looked over his men, whom he had brought here to die, and he wished to apologize- to tell them he's sorry. That the gamble didn't work, as gambles sometimes don't, and he'd been so reduced in strength that he'd had to bet the whole thing on a coin flip.

But fifty-fifty means it's anyone's game. The coin hasn't landed yet, but it was still pretty clear it wasn't going to be tails, and all their heads will roll for it. There's too many of them. Far, far too many, and dragons besides; if this army was guarding Myrddin, he'd have simply turned around. As it stood, while he didn't know _why _the Alliance army wasn't waiting at the Great Bridge, he _was _grateful for it. At least he can do some damage, before the end.

It's all he'll be able to do. He sighed, shaking his head. He was going to go down in history as Faerghus' dumbest king. The king who came to Gronder Field, where the Kingdom was born, and managed to lose it all.

He tried not to think about that. Tried not to hear the condemnations his mind imagined, that will surely roll onto his head, as the future looks at his plans and, with the benefit of hindsight, calls them foolish and shortsighted. That's not fair; he did the best he could with what he had.

It simply wasn't enough.

He hoped his mom and dad knew he loved them. He hoped his mother was okay at Arianrhod. He hoped that they both remember him not as the King who lost the Kingdom but as just their son, who tried his best. He prayed that they didn't hate him for it.

But he will not be merely a disappointment to his parents. He hoped that his troops knew that he did not do this foolishly, that he took the only play he had, and while it has failed, he did not lead them here out of stupidity or foolishness. He had been chasing Mercedes' last message, the last word she'd sent before Hilda went down there in the dark and cut down Mercedes and all her soldiers. A message of hope... of a red notebook... of something in Agarthan ruins that might change the course of this war.

But the Alliance found them too soon, and now whatever promise is in those Agarthan ruins will have to be found by someone else. He wondered about the word she'd sent in code... Shambhala...

But it was a mystery he would never answer, and he put it out of his mind, as he observed the battlefield one last time. Gronder Field. Here where the Kingdom was once saved, it shall now be damned; Claude had probably set it up that way, he always did love history, he would know what this place meant to Faerghus. Dimitri remembered a time when they were schoolmates, remembered the mock battle here (which his sister had won, of course, with that strange teacher's help), remembered laughter and a feast afterwards.

Garreg Mach's great dream, the idea that if the nobility of each nation could come together, something like peace would reign, for what man would kill his schoolyard friends? Even a second's hesitation born of remembering younger days could make a nobleman change his mind about a war with a former friend, and save many lives and much grief.

But the only people feasting after this battle will be the crows. Claude had been the Storm Caller; he had never been their friend.

The Alliance was making ready, dragons taking flight, archers getting ready. They were slow about it, but they didn't need to be fast; they were going to win, after all, you only had to look at the difference in army sizes to know that.

Dimitri steadied himself, and went to ready his men, and did his best to act like this was all according to plan. He acted confident, proud, as if there is one last ace up his sleeve; and that's been true for so long that, before he ever took the throne, they called him the Daring Prince,so some of them start to... believe. The fear around their hearts releases, just a little. They'll die bravely, and believing it is in service to some plan, instead of just being a waste, and that was the only kindness he could do for them at this late hour.

It will be his last service to them as King.

-

“ Alliance is moving,” came the call, from a ballista sharpshooter named Jeik, a Dagda mercenary who'd been paid to serve for one year and had remained with them for three, finding heroic rebellion to his liking. He racked his weapon, loaded it. “ Weapons ready.”

“ Alright,” Dorothea said, rising to take her place. “ Showtime, folks.”

The Eagles made ready. Their commander, Dorothea, ran down the plan in her head, one more time. Get nearby using the woods for cover, then attack from so close that the Alliance would have no time for their bows to do all the killing for them. But plans failed... like this plan would, inevitably. All plans faded in the face of battle; it was the mark of a commander to improvise.

She considered the disposition of her forces, went down the list, so that she would know them, that in battle she would not have to waste time wondering who was where and doing what. Like memorizing lines for a stageplay, a time that seemed so long ago now- Mittelfrank a different world, another world, and this rebellion, this labor of war, the only thing that had ever been real in her life.

She'd be in the second wave, along with her team of mages- snipers, all, mages whose natural magic had a talent for killing at a distance. As Dorothea was usually too busy ordering others about to focus on her own squad, she had designed them to be mostly autonomous, needing little direction to know which targets to prioritize. To run the squad when she was busy, she'd chosen a woman from distant Morfis named Anri for her second-in-command- a brilliant officer, though she never spoke of her past in that distant desert land.  
  


Hubert's squadron was with her in the second rank, consisting of the few mages he'd been able to teach the eldest magic too- difficult work, darkness, hard to control for human hands. They were there to swat down dragons and wyvern riders, in that order, and knew their business well, though Hubert did not lead them so much as they followed what ever he was doing.

Last in the second wave were more general support troops and second-string soldiers, meant to move ahead and replace tiring members of the first wave, under command of a fiery Dagdan mage named Tao, as well as the archer contingent, led by a chipper former Adrestian poacher named Hans. They were the most common recipient of Dorothea's orders, and stood well within earshot- though when you were listening for Dorothea, that was quite a distance indeed, the lungs of steel that had once filled opera houses now one of the only certain ways to send orders across even the roar of battle.

The vanguard would be cavalry archers, led by Bernadette, who would run up, fire, wheel around, and then start circling, looking for weaknesses, and sending messengers back so that Dorothea would know what the battlefield as a whole looked like.

Behind them came the heavy infantry, the true first wave, the men and women who bore a mountain of steel on their shoulders and could stay on the front come hell or high water- multiple squads they had of those, for it had been one of the most vaunted and common professions of Adrestia's former military, but the ones foremost in Dorothea's mind were those run by her fellow Black Eagles. Caspar's squad, Raphael's squad, and Edelgard's, though Edelgard's were not lead by her so much as they tried to keep up.

Her squad was, in many ways, bodyguards, to protect their dead-eyed emperor, and as such, had been handpicked by Dorothea herself for their loyalty, their skill, and their silence... and it perhaps said something about the Black Eagles that, in Emperor Edelgard's own personal squad, only about half of them were Adrestians.

Byleth was behind both, with a squad of skirmishers, ready to leap in where trouble happened, and leap back out once the problem was fixed, Byleth favoring lighter armor and also wanting to be close to the front in case the Sword had to be committed to some desperate fight.

Right behind the infantry were Linhardt's healers, positioned so that they could be close enough to rescue the wounded but hopefully be protected enough by the heavy shields in front that they would not be the first to fall- though healers would die anyway, as they always did. Everyone targeted them first. Anyone who could undo the wounds you inflicted on your enemies and get them back into the fight was a target of the highest priority.

And behind them all, the ballistae, who would do their best to lower the withering hail of arrows that would be coming their way, and the reserves, consisting of Flayn and her dragons, Ferdinand's heavy cavalry, and Balbaroy's flyers.

Each had a specific role that made keeping back the wisest choice. For Cethleann's tribe, that role was primarily anti-dragon work; Hubert and his squad did that, too, but they had few dark mages, and the Alliance had a lot of dragons. Still, Allied dragons were usually younger and _always _dumber than Cethleann's folk, usually inexperienced in fighting other dragons, and far too brash. Dorothea would wait until the Allied dragons flew out to commit themselves somewhere, and then she'd order Flayn's manaketes to jump them. Allied dragons didn't often fight other dragons- but Flayn and her comrades did, and the experience was fatally telling.

Ferdinand's heavy cavalry would wait, ready to ambush when weakness presented itself to Dorothea's eyes- a second charge to open up a second front, a heavy crush that could put an already strained enemy to rout, so that the cavalry could run them down later. The flyers, led by a violent Sreng ex-pat named Balbaroy, would do the same when called, a third front, in hopes of overwhelming the foe and panicking them. An army that would not run could be invincible in the face of far superior forces; an army that ran, though, was not an army, but just screaming victims, and a force a third the size could triumph if they broke their foe before they, themselves, broke.

And Black Eagles do not break.

Dorothea reached up to adjust a hat that wasn't there- old nervous habit, she'd lost her hat two years ago and had always wondered where it went- and then strode out, confident. She passed Edelgard on the way, and almost stopped, because Edelgard's face seemed... different... she seemed to be wrestling with herself... but then someone had a question, and she got caught up in the minutiae of command, and had no more time to think of Edelgard, or the thin tear coming from her eye.

-

Dimitri goes to his officers at the last, and he kisses Dedue their last kiss. He tastes like he always has- strong and heavy and alive, firm and strong as Duscurian steel.

“ I love you,” he murmurs. Dedue holds him tight.

“ I love you too,” his husband whispers into his hair. It will have to be enough. Maybe Claude will bury them together. He sometimes has a sense of honor, the Grand Duke of Dragons does, when Rhea does not overrule him.

“ Officers,” Dimitri calls, and his Blue Lions approach. Their faces are grim; they know they are doomed, and Dimitri cannot lie to them, they are his only friends. He struggles with what to say a moment, before, finally, sighing.

“ I'm sorry,” he says instead, and it is Ashe who answers first.

“ You did the best you could,” he says to his King with a shrug. “ I'm proud to have served you, Dimitri.”

“ Same here,” Sylvain says. “ You're a good man and you'd have made a damn good King. Proud to know you, Dimitri.”

“ Same here- boar,” Felix says, but with a smile. “ My father was proud to serve yours... and I am proud to serve you. And prouder still to kill these sons of bitches, who killed my brother.”

“ Revenge for Glenn has been an honor,” Ingrid agreed, bowing her head to Dimitri. “ But to serve a great king is every knight's dream... and no greater king could I serve than you. I am at peace.”

He smiles at them, a moment of genuine joy despite his gloom. To think, that what had once just been his schoolmates were now... this...

“ I am honored to command you,” Dimitri finally says, overwhelmed. “ Let's cost the Alliance everything we can.”

With that done, he turned to their guest, the lone Eagle who was not with her flock... though he wonders if her flock even exists, if the Black Eagles are not merely a nursery rhyme for an oppressed people, a bedtime story to make the Alliance boogeyman less scary.

“ Petra, I apologize. I cannot do what I promised- I cannot take you to Edelgard. I am sorry.”

Petra shrugs.

“ I've seen worse.”

Dimitri nods to the survivor of the Tragedy of Brigid; that's probably true. At least they are all soldiers, and not the innocent waiting to be cut down. He turns, holding up his ancient ancestral spear, and tries not to think about how history will judge him.

But even as Dimitri prepares to die, he hears a sound that he will remember until the day he dies. It is the sound that announces that his coin flip is not done after all, that someone else has caught his coin just before it hit the ground and thrown it back into the air again.

Horns. Deep horns, like the growl of the earth, resounding from deep caverns. Horns on the wind, horns on the horizon, horns playing a tune that has been banned in all Fodlan for five years. An Adrestian tune, beyond ancient, of praise to the Empire and to Nemesis, King of Liberation.

An _Imperial _tune.

The shout goes up among the troops.

“ Eagles! It's the Black Eagles!”

The shout rises and suddenly, before his eyes, there they are, decked out in reds and blacks, flying banners that would get you executed in the new world Claude and his draconic overlords have made. Dimitri pulls out his spyglass again, to look at this thing that cannot possibly be happening, but the glass tells him the same story as his eyes did- the Black Eagles striding forth like giants, emerging out of the woods like fae, like in the old tales, like legendary figures come to life.

And that's what they are, in many ways; Dimtri had not entirely believed the Eagles to be real, had assumed it to be the kind of story that always follows lost royalty, and believed Edelgard dead, even as Petra swore she was alive. He'd assumed the Black Eagles were just what Adrestians called all their resistance movements, since even the poorest and most absurdly desperate rebels of Adrestia painted black wings on their backs.

But now he sees that the rumors told the truth, as he scans over them with his spyglass; the Black Eagles are real. Petra jumps, shouts for joy as she, finally, lays eyes on the fabled Black Eagles, as she sees her sister again, in the flesh and real.

Real... and so close to the Alliance that their assault is beginning only a few yards from the ranks of the golden many. This is a surprise charge from quarters so close it is almost unbelievable, but then again, that's what legends _do- _unbelievable things. Impossible things.

Not so impossible, for the Black Eagles. Five years of running have made them secretive, stealthy, has taught them how to hide even from Claude's brilliant eyes, and so, even as they announce their presence, they are upon the Alliance, who have no time to get ready, who barely have time to figure out they are under attack at all.

The officers are in the lead, and Dimitri recognizes them, it has been five years and so much has changed, but he sees them and he knows them- he recognizes first Annette, his former Lion, in command of a rag-tag squadron of mages, fire leaping from her hands, but the others he knows, too, memories flashing by as he sees them. A proud archer on horseback makes him remember a soft, purple-haired girl who had planted flowers on Jeralt's grave despite her shyness, an act lauded by those who knew how hard it must have been for her; a giant of a man with blonde hair makes him remember a time when Felix had sparred with the Leceister beast, skill against strength. A commanding figure calling down orders and lightning bolts with equal aplomb calls to mind Sylvain's failed attempts to get a songstress' attention; a dour man reminds him of one who wanted to be Edelgard's shadow.

Friends of his, long lost, come to him now in his hour of need.

And there, in the front behind a screen of cavalry archers, Edelgard, charging forth, and his heart leaps in his chest, _Edelgard_, who he has owed an eye and his life for five years, who saved him as surely as Dedue had, once upon a time. Edelgard, whose one eye blazes with a brilliant fury... is she crying? Even at this distance, the tiniest gleam of a tear running down her face in the spyglass...

His spyglass spots another figure, and his eyes widen further. It must be a day for miracles, because right behind her is _Byleth_, the Goddess' chosen, dead these five years, but alive now, and the Sword of the Creator in her hands.

“ ADRESTIA!” Edelgard bellows, so loud he hears her even at this distance, and sees in his spyglass the obvious surprise of those around her- but then every voice echoes that shout, a roll of thunder that rolls over the Alliance seconds before the infantry crash into the Alliance with an indesribable noise that resounds over all Gronder Field.

The attack is an unmitigated success. Edelgard, Caspar, and Raphael in the front cutting soldiers down like knights in chivalric tales, Bernadette and her swift cavalry circling and releasing arrows enough to fill the sky, Hubert and Annette a storm of magic. Massive bolts from hidden ballistae rain down and cut down rows of soldiers. Byleth is somehow the deadliest of them all, each flick of her blade slicing enemy soldiers open, her whip lashing out to tear heads from shoulders with deadly elegance, her face betraying nothing of her thoughts and more frightening for that calm than a thousand snarls would be.

They fight like heroes, they fight like gods- they fight like figures from the old stories he'd loved in his youth. Five years of war has made them experts at it, there are no warriors like the Eagles in all of Fodlan. They have brought the smallest force here, a dagger to the hammer of Faerghus and the sword of Lecesiter, but this Adrestian edge is so sharp that they cut like an army three times their size.

The Alliance tries desperately to wheel, but they are trapped by their own preparations; ballistae out of position, archers and healers exposed, cavalry trying to turn horses that balk at the sudden explosion of violence right beside them. Even the dragons are confused, not sure where to go. By attacking on the right flank of the Alliance, they've even managed to put most of the enemies' shields on the wrong side. A perfect attack, creating lots of opportunities, particularly if the enemy should be attacked from a different direction...

Dimitri's face splits into a grin. He'd called his shot too early; the gamble had not quite finished, the coin might yet land on its edge. He had not counted on this, but half of luck is pretending you meant to do that; and this is a jackpot he can collect, he must collect, it will save the world, if he can win it today.

“ Soldiers of the Kingdom!” he bellows, and cannot quite keep the surprised laughter out of his voice. His men seem to think this was his trick, and triumphant shouts and cheers for the Adrestians go up and down the line along with his commands. “ Will you let a bunch of Imperials show you up? For Faerghus and the Church!”

“ For Duscur!” Dedue yells, and they charge across the field.

The coin spins in the air.

-

Edelgard was ablaze.

Edelgard, in the thick of it, wanting to swim in ashes- wanting to go back- but she was furious, she was so full of burning emotion, and she found it... made her better, to feel, it made her fight _better. _She had always heard you should not feel anything in battle, that emotions made you weak, but that advice came from many who had never seen combat. From her fellow soldiers, who know battle like a lover, she had heard different stories; she had heard others say that emotion in battle could save you, that hatred could spur broken arms to swing swords, that love could make trembling legs leap to save another, that loyalty could stiffen a weak spine into steel. She believed it now, when her insides were all in a roil, anger and love and grief like a firestorm inside her; that same roil gave her arms strength, tightened up her focus, made her faster, because everything _meant _more, it was more important, now. She had to give more, because everything meant more.

The ashes had been her way of deadening a world that made her feel too much. A way of narrowing her inputs. Opening herself up hurt, it hurt like _hell_, Goddess, she _cared_, which made everything in the war so much _worse_.

One of her bodyguards caught a hammer blow to his helmet, staggering him at the worst possible time, as two more enemies attacked. While he managed in his desperation to catch an incoming halberd on his shield, the second soldier dashes int to drive the hard edge of a knife into his guts.

Edelgard hurls burning magic into the man's face, then hacks the halberd in half with her next blow, before finding the original hammer wielder and bashing his skull in with her shield.

“ Luke, pull back and clear your head,” she ordered, which stunned him more than the hammer had. And it should. Luke, Goddess, she had known this man for three years and never once said his name- a Kingdom veteran, from some ruined barony, who had saved her life time and again. She's never told him how grateful she is for that, has never _been _actually grateful, not to him or to any of the soldiers who take up the literally thankless task of keeping her alive.

Goddess, how much has she lost, in the ashes? How much time? A tear catches hot in the corner of her eye, blinked away a second later as she uses her axe to hook onto the shoulder of one of her guards and tug her out of the way of an axe.

She's surprised, too, so surprised that Edelgard has to save her two more times in the next few seconds before, with a laugh, she goes back to war, spinning a greatsword that most would take two hands to lift in one massive paw, her heavy shield in the other. Mae, Edelgard thought her name was, some big Adrestian farm girl who had joined the Eagles with stars in her eyes, and been elevated to guardian of her Emperor, all big heart and sweet soul- what was Edelgard doing, that for her Emperor to save her life _surprised _her? This girl _believed _in her, more than almost anybody!

Something like ghosts kept dancing around the edges of her eye- but there were people here, alive, who mattered more, and Edelgard kept her eye on them. Brigid would always be there, in the back of her head; but the Black Eagles, they were around her now, and they deserved more, they deserved _better_, from this woman who dared call herself their Emperor. Dorothea deserved the title more than anyone did at this point, hell, _Caspar _deserved the title more; at least he'd been here, been present, while Edelgard went quiet inside.

If she lived through today... then _never again_. No matter how it hurt. She would be an Emperor ablaze, if she had to be. The thought stuck in her mind as she fought, shield between her protectors and death, more present than she had ever been, muscles burning with the pump-pull-push of combat.

A resounding clash from nearby distracted her- she took a second to glance over- the Lions had pounced. Not in the neat, planned way of the Eagles, but this pride was big enough that it didn't really matter much; they hit with all the delicate subtlety of the Goddess' own sledgehammer. Soldiers were swept off their feet by the force of the charge, which was spread out over the entire Alliance front- or what _should _have been the front, but due to the Eagles' attack, was now their left flank. Dimitri could not have done that attack to a well-armored, prepared frontline... but to an exposed side, he could spread his forces thin and threaten the entire army at once.

The Alliance men were pressed hard, from two sides, in a battle that they had almost certainly presumed would go their way; a few began to panic. Commanders sent messages to the top- and though none of the Eagles or Lions would know this for some time, the messages were simply not answered. Lorenz had fled the field when he saw the Kingdom begin its great charge, but only after he called his staff officers together into his tent- and then, with his burning magic, setting them all on fire, killing them all. Lorenz survived the fiery end of his command tent because he'd downed about three draughts of pure water beforehand. While it gave him stomach cramps on the ride back to Myrddin that were so bad he'd have preferred dying, it also made the magical fire slide right off of him, and so he lived through his act of arson. The command tent was torched, along with everyone who could possibly lead this army, and that wound only grew as the battle grew more desperate. There was no one to reinforce the army's backbone, nobody to give orders, nobody to structure their efforts.

Feeling that it fell to them to prevent disaster, in went the dragons, who needed no commander, and had gotten bored waiting for someone to tell them to go in. The Allied dragons were determined to put these human interlopers down and were hyper-focused on the humans; thus, they were terribly surprised by Flayn's tribe, who tore into them, losing few of their number. They even gain two members, two fire dragons who, seeing that they were outmatched, surrendered, and would eventually join the fold thanks to Flayn's attentions and charisma.

Seeing their dragons die screaming destroyed what was left of the Alliance's morale. It panicked them more than anything else the Eagles could possibly have done. That's not how Alliance battles went- the dragons went in, and the enemy died. Dragons were a trump card- and having played it and lost, the Alliance has no more aces up its sleeve. When dragons began to attack _them_, that was it.

Men began to run, and what was once a few scattered cowards became a general rout as courage faltered and men begged their legs to do their duty, running as fast as they could. Not all did so, of course; in every army there are the brave, the stupid, the sadistic, and the faithful... but a few scattered great souls could not hold the entire army back.

The press around Edelgard eased up as the rout began in earnest. Edelgard checked her bodyguards in the sudden clear, making sure they were alright, and took a second to catch her breath, assessing the situation as she breathed in and out. Dear Goddess. They're... they're going to do it. _They're going to do it_. If the Alliance had stood and fought, it could have eventually ground out a victory by weight of numbers alone; but because it ran, an army bigger than the Kingdom's and the Eagle's combined was outdone by both.

Dorothea sent in Ferdinand to encourage them to keep moving, trying to get them to flee _across _Gronder Field instead of back into the woods. They can run down men on foot over the plains, and the Kingdom Grand Army will be even better at it than they will be; Dorothea wants as few soldiers to escape as possible. Edelgard nodded at the decision she overheard, idly watched Byleth and her squad begin chasing a routing group of archers, then turned to her bodyguard.

“ We should fight our way to Dimitri,” Edelgard told them. “ I need to speak with him.”

She needed an _alliance_ with him, more specifically. She had not the numbers to take Myrddin; she needed his help. Hopefully, he proved amiable.

Her battalion nodded, smiling at her- bruised, beaten, hurt, but none of them are dead. Edelgard had kept them safe, if not perfectly intact, as one showed by spitting out a tooth.

“ Lead, and we follow,” Luke said, and the Emperor nodded to him as Mae laughed, a sound as big as all the rest of her- like Raphael, she was, a Beast of Adrestia to go with Red Raphael. Edelgard gave him a smile in turn, and then they pressed on.

They pushed on by themselves, the fighting easier as they skirted the flanks of what remained of the battle, the war resolving itself into pockets of individual fighting as specific squads of Alliance troops stood their ground while the rest ran, a battle conducted piecemeal. Finding Dimitri proved easier than she'd expected- after helping out a Kingdom vanguard bogged down by spearmen, Edelgard and her battalion saw Dimitri, away from the fighting, getting a rather nasty cut on his arm healed by a Church mage. When he saw her, his face lit up, and he waved with his good arm to Edelgard, waving his own personal guard back so he could see her.

( Dorothea, meanwhile, began to panic herself, wondering where Edelgard was- she'd lost track of her unit in the fighting, as had everyone else she asked. She sent scouts to find her. She did not suspect that Edelgard had made a decision to _talk _to Dimitri- Edelgard _never _talked in combat- and suspected the worst. Fear for the woman who some part of her still loved flowed through her, but she kept it tamped down. Focus. The battle was not over yet.)

“ I can't believe it!” Dimtri shouted to Edelgard, as she approached- carefully. She did not want to provoke a fight when she came in peace because guards, jumpy from battle, mistook fast movement for attack.

“ Stand back,” she told her guards, in a voice much louder than required- to make sure that both they and the Kingdom soldiers heard. “ Dimitri's a friend of mine.”

“ Aye, I am,” he said, talking louder too- rulers, the both of them were. Standing up as the healer finished and flexing his fingers, he walked over to the edge of his bodyguards. “ And a friend you are, too! Without you, I don't think we could have won the day.”

“ We couldn't have done it without you, either,” Edelgard replied, looking him over as they both stepped to the edge of their respective rings of bodyguards. The battle was still ongoing, but it was far enough away now that Edelgard judged that they had time to talk, and every bit of Dimitri's body language said he was friendly. “ I'd like to talk, when this is over.”

“ Sure!” Dimitri said, chuckling. His next words were softer. “ Can't believe you're alive, Edie. I'd heard all these rumors... and Petra thought you were alive... but I didn't believe them.”

“ Petra?” Edelgard asked, and felt her heart stop. Petra? Her sister, whose name no one has said in her presence in five years...

“ Petra's alive, Edelgard,” Dimitri said to her. “ She's been hunting you for five years. She's with my forces. I'll send somebody to grab her. She _swore _you were still alive.”

Edelgard paused, closed her eye, took a deep breath.

“ Dimitri, I do not have the words to thank you for this.”

“ Don't need them,” he said softly, with a smile. Still the same old Dimitri, after all this time. “ You saved me, a long time ago- I owe you much more. We'll talk, when this is done. You Eagles have done right by us- I didn't fancy our chances with the Alliance without you. Don't fancy our chances in the future without you, either.”

“ Yes,” Edelgard breathed, through the thick knot in her throat. Some part of her stayed focused, ablaze- Dimitri's words meant that he wanted an alliance, too, which was what she'd sought in coming here- but the rest of her was laser-focused on one point. Petra. Petra was alive, she was going to see Petra today, and not just as a ghost. She had thought, in the spyglass... oh Goddess, she had _seen Petra_, how ridiculous was that?

Dimitri opened his mouth. Whatever he was going to say was interrupted by a yell from a Kingdom bodyguard, who leapt before Dimitri's right side and took a hatchet to his skull, the blood _fountaining _out of his helmet.

They all wheeled to face where that had come from as the Kingdom man dropped down and died. There, above them, descending out of the sky- the Dragon Knight and his wyverns, who had flown over the battlefield to hunt two very, very specific targets. Even if the battle was a rout, the Alliance could still emerge as the victor.

And Edelgard had made that victory a simple matter, by approaching Dimitri at all, she had put both royals in one conveniently attack place.

_Stupid!_ She berated herself, as the wyverns dove- all save Seteth himself.

Her and Dimitri's bodyguard moved as one to protect their lords, red shield to blue, but the wyverns split right before impact, and then they were surrounded by attackers on all sides. These were no petty soldiers; they were elite troops, well-trained, and the difference staggered. Wyverns bit and dragged shields down so their riders could kill, or snapped at exposed limbs, while their riders bore great scythes that sliced through armor, and all of it was done with incredible coordination, the wyverns wheeling about them, distracting and tormenting the troops.

Edelgard and Dimitri, standing near each other, ending up fighting back to back, the wyverns circling and circling, moving the bodyguards out of position- something Edelgard saw, but couldn't do anything about. Too many wyverns, too few bodyguards- and now Alliance troops were moving in, seeing the wyverns and being commanded by the Dragon Knight himself. What bodyguards were not stumbling to stay alive in the storm of wings and teeth were busy battling the renewed efforts of Alliance soldiers- and more and more of them, seeing this burst of frenzied violence in their favor, were finding their spines again. This might yet turn the rout around...

( A scout returns to Dorothea with news. A moment later, Dorothea and her entire squadron are up and _moving_. She has no time to grab Linhardt, who is somewhere else, buried deep in the art of healing; she doesn't even have time to tell Flayn, who is busy tending to her own wounds. The scout is sent to find one other- Dedue- to tell him what is happening to their rulers, and where he must go, and the scout will prove her worth; she finds Dedue long before Dorothea is able to reach the tangled knot of battle, and Dedue sets off to reach his husband, too.)

But Edelgard had no time to think of how the greater battle was going, struggling desperately as she was. A wyvern dove just as another came from behind, and both were distractions, as another came diving down from her right and grabbed her axe arm. Edelgard was caught and dragged, somehow keeping her grip but being jerked along several feet, wrenching her arm horribly. Her shield worked as a club, hammering on the beast's knee until it released its grip, dropping her at last.

She landed hard from her semi-flight, skidding a bit, and turned around to see Dimitri, all by himself... and the thing he could not see, that was coming in from behind him, as he fought two wyvern riders.

The Dragon Knight. Ancient terror. Swooping down for Dimitri's unaware back.

No.

“ _Brother!_” she yelled, naming him kin in his presence for the first time- last time, perhaps- as she raced forward, visions of Garreg Mach before her eyes. Not again. A wyvern rider tried to stop her, and Edelgard threw her axe into his face, a perfect throw that dropped him dead; she paid it no attention, eye looking only at the Dragon Knight coming to Dimitri, who, having heard her scream, was turning to see what danger was behind him.

Too slow to save himself... but Edelgard was _not_.

Her charge put her between the Knight and Dimitri, and so the fatal swoop missed- it did not crash into Dimitri's defenseless back, but into Edelgard's heavy shield, and so it killed no one. He crashed heavy against her shield, slamming into her with the weight of a mountain, and while she clung to her shield and somehow stayed on her feet, the impact knocked her breath out of her. As Cichol's wyvern bit her shield and tugged it down, that ancient trick of wyvern riders, the Dragon Knight raised his long handled axe, to bring it down on her skull, and she realized that she could not stop him.

She'd lost an eye for Dimitri, once. Now she would lose her life. _A fair trade_, she had time to think, and be at peace.

But...

Dimitri's spear swung up, the timing perfect, aimed at the Dragon Knight's falling wrist, impacting just as his swing had gained real force. The combined momentum was enough to send Dimitri's spear, ancient dragonbone blade, through whatever strange armor the Dragon Knight wore, cutting through gauntlet and flesh and bone alike.

( She had forgotten this- her and Dimitri are in a cycle of rescue. As she saves him, he saves her, every time.)

The Dragon Knight's hand was taken off at the wrist, his blood spraying into the air, his deadly axe skittering harmlessly off of Edelgard's right pauldron, missing her by a literal hair- she saw the hair it missed her by, in a moment of the perfect clarity that adrenaline sometimes created, an auburn strand whose very tip was cut by the axe's impossibly sharp edge.

For a moment, Edelgard could not process that she was alive, but then the Dragon Knight _howled_, a terribly undignified sound like a tiger being beaten to death, and she snapped out of her daze.

The wyvern released her shield to bite at her, trying to defend its rider in extremity, but it discovered its mistake as Edelgard, shield released, bashed it straight into the wyvern's jaws- and with her free hand, summoned up fire, cooking one of its eyes to a crisp with a swift fireball. Dimitri at her side struck out with his spear, but the armor glanced the blow with a sound like scraping nails, saving the beast's life.

The Dragon Knight retreated, him and his mount both howling, blood spraying from his empty wrist, and it is that, finally, which throws the wyvern riders off their coordination, letting the guards of the two royals take them down. The common Alliance forces, too, who had nearly rallied, hung back, now uncertain again, as Edelgard bent down as fast as she could and picked up Seteth's discarded axe, the severed hand flopping lamely off the handle as she straightened up and shook it.

“ Thank you,” Edelgard said, in the small moment they had, and Dimitri's laughter was bright and beautiful.

“ Thank _you_! That would have killed me!” he announced, as he turned his back on her, knowing she would guard it with her life, had already tried to do so. “ Beating the Dragon Knight... now that's something, isn't it? We make a great team.”

“ We do,” Edelgard replied, turning around herself, knowing that Dimitri would save her, should attack come from behind. Their guards formed up near them, reduced and wounded... but still there, and mixed, too, having gotten confused in the fighting, a shield of red and blue alternating.

The Alliance soldiers nearby were nervous, did not want to fight those who sent the Dragon Knight not just fleeing but _screaming _away; so they paused, not sure if they should rush in or stay back, and none of them wanting to be at the lead of a charge that would prove fatal for at least _some _of them.

The pause proved to be fatal, too. A wrecking ball in human form hit them as they waited, resolving itself into a Duscurian giant- Dedue, come to save his husband. A schoolyard chant rippled through Edelgard's mind, something Sylvain had come up with- _you cannot subdue Dedue!_\- born of the quick games of athletics the Lions had loved so much, that Dedue had proven to be the best at, though the humble man had never bragged of his skill.

Dedue's axe and shield swept entire rows of men off their feet. The son of chefs, who once upon a time had saved a king in an act of bravery, was at this moment fighting at the head of a group of his fellow men of Duscur, who arrived moments after he did, chasing their long-legged captain. Dedue, once nobody, now King's Consort on the back of a single act of courage, fought like the royalty he was, and none could stand before him. It would be like trying to fight the sun.

Beside him, a crackle of thunder forewarned of lightning as Dorothea and her mages open up, the songstress herself striding across the battlefield, her favored stage for the last five years. Wise Dorothea, whose legends did not often talk of how deadly she is- but deadly she _was_, a storm that walked in the shape of a woman, and lightning rolled off of her lips and her hands. Alliance soldiers died in droves as she cleared the field with raging arcs of electricity, focused on reaching her Emperor's side, opera-trained lungs able to keep up spellcasting longer than any of her compatriots. The voice that had once sung arias now added its weight to the bolts she called forth from the clear blue sky, the thunder her accompanying choir, and none could stand before her. It would be like trying to fight a hurricane.

_My Dorothea_, Edelgard thought, _mighty Dorothea_, who has led in her absence all these long years, who she must talk to, when this is over, and apologize to, and... perhaps... admit, at last, her love to, who should be called Emperor's Consort, her appearance here with Dedue is the universe telling her what she should have seen all along, a wife for her to stand next to a husband for Dimitri. She might offer the crown entire to her; no one has deserved it so much as Dorothea, these last five years.

But there was no more thought after that, for Edelgard caught sight of someone behind the both of them, guarding their backs- but that was impossible- long purple hair flying, a blade in her hands, dancing, arcs of blood flying from her swinging sword as enemy soldiers dropped like flies all around her- not a lover but kin of hers, oh Goddess, her sister, _alive_-

“ Petra?” Edelgard whispered, as the Brigid woman, her sister, her retainer, lost all these years, returned to her side amidst a dozen Alliance corpses.

“ Edelgard!” Petra yelled, as she caught up to her. The two women stared at each other a long moment, taking in the changes in each other, ignorant of the battlefield around them- uncaring of Byleth, in fine form, lashing entire groups of enemies to ribbons, of Raphael lifting and throwing a horse and bowling over an entire squad of men, of Ferdinand and his men running down the cowards as they fled.

“ You're alive,” Edelgard choked out, and her voice cracked in a dozen places on two words.

“ So are you,” Petra said, voice no more stable. Around them, the Lions, in a spirit of competition, tried to even the score between them and the Eagles. Felix hurled lightning to try and keep up with Dorothea- and failed to do so; Sylvain taunted an entire squad of men into abandoning their position, and killed them for it.

But the star is Ingrid, Ingrid the Widow Knight, who joins Caspar as one of the few to tackle a dragon alone and walk away unharmed, leaping from her horse onto an ice dragon's back. Running up its body despite its best attempts to throw her off, Ingrid drove her spear so deep in its eye that she pierced its brain, killing it instantly. She even managed to get off safely, Ingrid using the beast's dying throes to throw herself back on to her horse nearby with a perfect landing.

( Caspar, nearby, will curse her for stealing his gimmick from him.)

They will call her Ingrid Almighty, after this, define her not as Glenn's widowed wife but as the peerless knight she is, and though Edelgard and Petra were not even five yards away, neither of them will remember any of it when asked later.

They will remember only a _relief_\- they will remember only that they are both _alive_, that for all the time that has passed and all the catching up they will have to do, they are finally together again.

“ The battle continues,” Dedue reminded the two smiling women, gently. Dorothea elbowed him- the battlefield around them was clear for a moment, and just for a second, Dorothea felt young again, surrounded by schoolmates.

“ Oh, hush,” she said. “ They're having a moment!”

Dedue chuckled, but accepted the criticism, and was silent, as the two shook themselves and finally turned around.

“ Dimitri,” Edelgard said, “Le'ts... finish this..”

He nodded. “ Absolutely. Into the breach!”

The quintet turned, and _re_turned to the one constant of their lives, war.

-

The battle takes a day. A day of terrible violence, but somehow there is a feeling of hope in the soldiers, they all take heart even as many of them fall; this is resistance, this is striking back, this is the Kingdom and the Empire taking a stand for all the dead and dishonored of the last five years. This has the feeling of a tide turning, this has the feeling of storms clearing, this has the feeling of _salvation_. This is the sense of roses blooming, of the moon rising over a free country, of the great hurricane being pushed back.

And so it is that the Second Battle of Gronder Field is not the death knell of the Kingdom, but its salvation; and as the Kingdom was once born from victory on these grounds, now too is the Empire reborn, rising again, a phoenix from its own ashes.

Or a Black Eagle, as the case may be- burned, wounded, but still flying high.

(And they do feast afterwards, on the Alliance supply train that they manage to capture, and at the table they fly the flags of Adrestia and Faerghus united, and old friends meet and chat, the bonds between their nations reforged. Even the war cannot shatter all the hopeful dreams of Garreg Mach.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the closest thing to military fantasy I may ever write, inspired mostly by how much I HATE dumbass battle sequences. It's hard, to know military strategy, but also to not be right-wing; nobody on the left wants to talk military stuff with me, lol.
> 
> This was gonna have other stuff in it but Gronder Field is a huge deal, and it was big enough I decided to leave the focus on the Battle for Gronder Field itself.
> 
> Fun fact: If this were a legit Fire Emblem game, this battle would be called Bonds of the Eagle and the Lion.
> 
> Edit: Had to rewrite some of this because I forgot to review before I posted. Lessons learned, kids.


	5. The Night We Became Whole

**The Night We Became Whole**

When the battle was truly over- all but the mopping up, as janitors and generals both say- Dimitri had left to congregate his forces, and Edelgard had left to do the same, with the addition of one more- Petra. Lost Petra, whose lone flight was over at last, who returned to camp and to her flock amid unbounded shouts of joy. The open delight and happy disbelief of the officers was a benevolent plague that spread through all the gathered Eagles, though the majority had never known Petra; they celebrated with their commanders the return of their lost soul. It was always nice, after a day of killing and death, to see someone alive, so even as they took stock and made ready to mourn their dead, they cheered the return of one alive.

Even faces used to gloom lit up, to see this miracle- Ferdinand smiling, a rare expression on his somber face, Raphael grinning like he used to, before the war, Linhardt in gentle tears. Hubert, to whom it meant more than most, just stared at her, his throat working and making no sound, wavering on his usually-steady feet.

There was talk. Edelgard missed most of it. She shut down, partially- not all the way, but she fell into herself, just a little bit. A way of protecting herself, from emotions too hot to touch, a way to cool the fire so that she could handle it. That was all the ashes were, in the end- a refuge, safety, a place to run to, away from herself. She could see that now, with the little spark of her she made sure stayed lit, as she fought off the urge to stay. It was so sweet, so calm... but wrong. Her people deserved better, they deserved _more_. They deserved _Edelgard_, even if it burned her. She wrestled with her ashes, tried to light herself once more.

When she won and emerged out of herself, when all her struggle lit her fires again, she was back in her command tent. She wasn't sure how. She remembered walking through camp, all the words and joy, and then... a blur, her sister beside her again, not a ghost but _alive_. Some combination of Caspar clearing out people who wanted to talk to her, Dorothea suggesting they talk in private, Annette leading the way before standing guard outside the tentflap...

Heh. That told her well enough how she got back to her tent, then. Her Eagles, taking care of her, as they have for five long years.

(She has no idea what reward would be commensurate with this kindness, but she will find out, if it takes all her life, she will find a way to repay them their kindnesses, for keeping hold of her cracked skull, for keeping her mind safe and intact inside it until such time as she could begin to heal, keeping her sanity from sloshing out like water from a broken cup. If they survive this war, if she sits the throne in Enbarr as she should, she will see them as kings and queens, if they should ask, and anything else they want besides. What's the point of being Emperor if human greatness cannot be rewarded?)

She collapsed onto the mat she slept on, muscles tired from battle and mind tired from revelation. Petra sat down across from her, smiled at her.

Edelgard surprised both of them by _bawling, _deep, terrible sobs.

Petra was on her in a moment, hugging her tight, and Edelgard sobbed into her arms- sobbed and sobbed. So much to cry over. Over Petra, gone these five years. Over all that must have happened to her on her long lone flight. Over her _joy _at Petra's return, even her happiness brings her to tears, the relief it sparks in her is so sharp.

But for herself, too. For all the things Edelgard has lost, amongst her ashes. All the things she should have said or done. The words she had not said, that have waited five years to be said. Soldiers unmourned by heartless Edelgard, praise that had never left her lips for her friends and all the good things they do for her, all the... all the _time _she lost, as lost as she once was.

She cried, for Edelgard-who-was-not-Edelgard- who had went away inside, sitting in that calm land of ashes, just letting the world wash over her, for five long years.

Five years worth of tears poured out of her, but when it was done, when she was reduced to sniffling in her sister's arms (and that is who Petra is, she can acknowledge what this Brigid woman is to her and what her loss meant- her family dead again, she had lost her sister five years ago), she felt... better. Warm. Alive. It burned, but it wasn't so bad, not as bad as she had feared. All the worst part of any suffering was the anticipation of it...

“ Edie,” Petra said, and she'd been crying, too. “ Edie, shhh, it's okay.”

Edelgard brushed tears from her sister's face.

“ It is now,” she said, and gave her a smile.

( There is much to do. Much to talk about... but it will be done, in time. For now, it is enough that they have each other again. It is enough that they are together once more. It is enough to begin.)

-

The manakete before Flayn was terrified. He had been taught all his life that he was superior to humanity, that dragons were the Goddess' favored children, and that against a dragon's divine might, no human could stand.

Now he was in a cage, huddled over his little brother, terrified. He was small for his age, too; his brother, even smaller. She'd initially thought them even younger than they were, though both were children in Flayn's eyes. Children, who had nonetheless stained themselves red with human blood...

But still just children.

“ Please, you said you'd heal him,” the boy said, hands returning again and again to his neck, where his dragonstone once sat- a dragonstone they'd removed when they caught him, that was, at the moment, safely in a caravan nearby.

“ I will,” Flayn said. “ But his constitution is... delicate. Was he... was he...”

She fumbled a moment, trying to remember the modern terminology she'd read in Garreg Mach's walls.

“ Premature?”

“ Huh?” the dragon boy said, cocking his head.

“ Premature. Born early,” Flayn corrected. “ Did he hatch after too short a time?”

“ Yeah, a lot do, you know,” his brother said. “ Under the lights. He was a runt.”

Ah. Seiros apparently held to the old words. That made this a bit easier. Cethleann returned to her work, and filed away that comment about 'the lights' for later, adding it to a pile of things her new followers have said that begin to paint a very, very specific picture.

“ Yeah, but, uh, don't call him that, he hates it,” the boy continued, as she kept working on his brother. “ What's that got to do with anything, though?”

“ Harder to heal,” Flayn said, as she poured energy into him. “ Most healing resets the body to an original state. For reasons even the humans have yet to figure out, very premature births destabilize that kind of healing... I have to do the harder kind of healing, repair things manually instead of allowing the body to simply restore itself.”

“ Oh, uh, huh,” he said, not sure what to say, and so instead looking around them. He was in a small jail they'd constructed out of bent over trees- not that he was much of an escape risk, without his dragonstone. Seiros' dragons weren't much of a threat as humans. Weren't much use either, Flayn thought; she'd had to teach her newcomers so many things, basic things, that Seiros had not bothered with in her buildup to war.

All around that cell, as evening began and the sun started it slow journey past the horizon, Cethleann's reborn tribe did the work of camp, gathering supplies from the wagons, assisting in setting up tents, or- generally in their true shapes- hauling cargo from the captured Allied supply train, which had been stocked for an army that frankly dwarfed the Eagles and so had all kinds of supplies for a smaller military to steal.

They weren't the only people stocking up; the Lions were ravaging a different part of this tremendous feast of carrion, and Cethleann was sure that some enterprising bandits or thieves had probably managed to take some of it as well- you always found vultures where there was a big enough carcass. Enough was still going to be left over that they couldn't carry it all, so their leaders were planning a feast in two days time, a celebration of their united victory- and probably a celebration of whatever scheme Dorothea was working on with Dimitri, something Flayn had heard her muttering to herself as she worked. Something about a federation...

The boy, who could no longer stand to look at his brother's pale face, could no longer even think about it, turned his mind to other things. “ Why- why do you do this?”

“ Hmm?” Flayn asked, as she kept healing. The boy's injuries were bad; one of her ice dragons had savaged him, and that chilling bite on his shoulder had spread destruction through his body like poison. Cold was fatal to a thing of heat, and it was in hopes that they would save his brother that the older had surrendered them both.

“ All... this,” he said, waving a hand. “ This is human work.”

Flayn gave him an amused smile. It was not the first time she'd heard that comment; for all their sacred strength, for all that they had come to her with honest hearts, seeking to do right, much of her new tribe had to learn this same lesson. They were all infected by Seiros' ideals, after all, even the noblest, and it fell to Cethleann to once again be the ancient antibody to that spiritual disease.

“ It is people work,” Flayn stressed, as her clever hands knit the boy's wounds closed, the energy her needle, his tissues her thread. “ It is the work of life. It is work that must be done, or no army ever moves. Human or Nabatean, Children of the Goddess or Firstborn of the World, any army would need someone to move supplies.”

“ That's what humans are for,” he said, daring a glance at his brother- but only a glance at that pale face. He wanted to cry, seeing his lively, scrappy little brother like that; but dragons did not cry, so he turned his head away again. “ That's... that's what humans are for. Have they enslaved you?'

Flayn barked a laugh, though her hands remained steady as she reintroduced the boy's bones to cartilage. That bite had been deep; Bleu had nearly killed him with that one attack. Not an uncommon thing, for Cethleann's tribe; Alliance dragons had so little experience fighting other dragons that sometimes, one strike was all it took. You had to defend yourself differently from an equally sized opponent, as compared to a small, nimble human, and few of Seiros' dragons knew how to do it.

“ Do you see any chains on us, little one?” she said, chuckling. “ Muzzles? Humans with whips, mages with their clever tricks?”

When she went silent, he realized it was not a rhetorical question, so he thought on the young dragon's words... who did not seem so young, who called him 'little one', the way elders did, who had an air of timelessness about her. After a moment, he unwillingly ground out the only answer he could give.

“ No...”

Flayn chuckled, summoning a little fire to her hand, to warm cold-deadened skin. “ We are here because we _choose _to be. We do this work because it needs to be done, not because anyone forces us to do it. And we do not make the humans do it, because that is not right; no people deserve to be forced into servitude to another. Would you accept the dominion of another tribe of dragons?”

“ No!” he said, bristling. The very idea! Only Seiros was excepted from that, because she had no tribe, was divine, and thus not like the other dragons, just as they were not like the humans. A hierarchy, as the Goddess intended.

“ Would you have a right to dominion over another tribe of dragons?”

“ No,” he said, less fiercely. That would be... wrong.

“ Then why would you have such a right over humans?” Flayn asked.

“ Because that's how the Goddess set it up! Humans weren't made by her, they're beneath us!”

How familiar this all was. This argument had an easy cadence in Flayn's ears; this was a discussion she'd had so many times she could almost do it by rote. Seiros' religion was a brute force thing, aimed towards a single, monomaniacal end, a double-edged blade that cut the insides of her followers to ribbons when they embraced it. Both brothers in this cell were injured, though the elder had his wounds on the inside, where, often, they were worse. A physical wound you could see, but a wound in your heart and soul, that could stay hidden for years, even as it bled you dry...

“ And you heard this from the Goddess Herself, I imagine? From Sothis' divine lips to your ear?”

The boy flinched at the name that left Flayn's lips. “ Don't- don't say that! Don't you know what could happen to you, throwing the Goddess' name around like that?”

“ It is just a name, child,” Flayn said, as she continued to work. Just a little more, and the boy's own constitution should restore him... assuming she hadn't made any mistakes during the healing process. “ We are Nabatea; names are not so important to us. Are you afraid of one?”

“ It's just... that's... Seiros said you shouldn't,” the boy said, confused.

“ Seiros fears her mother's name because hearing it hurts her,” Cethleann explained, as she finished with his brother. “ Seiros grieves her still. Sothis was a good mother, though it may be hard to see that, after all of Seiros' atrocities; but her daughter's pain comes from a place of love. It does not justify what she has done... but it is the truth. That Sothis would hate her for what she's become is something she puts out of her mind, I imagine.”

“ Sothis would never hate her daughter!” he exclaimed, and did not notice how he said her name.

“ I knew the Goddess, child. She wanted humanity and Nabatea to work together; I believe she may have even made us to be their companions, to do what they could not, as they do what we cannot. Sothis intended for us to work together for a better future, not to lord over each other.”

“ You're not that old,” he protested. Flayn chuckled.

“ I slept the long years after Seiros tried to kill me,” Cethleann said. “ I predate you by quite a bit. The Goddess was a lot more fun than Seiros portrays her as. Seiros never did have a sense of humor, but Sothis was fun.”

“ Humans killed her,” he said, as if it would shock her; to his surprise, the Saint nodded.

“ Almost certainly,” she said. “ I believe I even know who it was.”

“ But- then- what? How can you serve them?”

“ Again, I ask you- do you see masters here?” Cethleann said, waving her hand around them. She waited until he gave the same growling negative, then continued. “ We do not serve them. We serve _with _them. Our two races, united. As Sothis wanted- as Nemesis wanted. As all the wise folk of history have wanted.”

“ But... the Goddess... Nemesis killed her,” he said, stumbling. Seiros did not teach her people how to argue, how to think, just how to repeat. She had not, after all, set out to build a real religion, that would ask the great questions, whose followers might argue in good faith about good faith, ponder morality and meaning, and explore the mysteries of the sun and the stars and all the world around them. She had built only a hilt for the sword she sought to make, something by which she might grip it to swing it into her foes, a thing with which to make a blade of a people and a nation, and, holding it tight, manipulate them into war.

“ Perhaps,” Cethleann said, coming within inches of the one thing she had never admitted to herself about her king, the thing she thought she saw in his eyes- the last moments of a deity, and regret that could change a life. There were some sights that left a mark in your eyes. “ But he also sought to fulfill her dream, the cause she lived for. Life is complicated, little one.”

He stole another glance, saw the blood returning to his brother's face, and Flayn sighed in relief. The boy would live.

“ Now,” she said, turning to the manakete and clapping her hands together, “ who's hungry?”

-

Seiros growled as the dragonstone burst apart in her hands. Too much power, too much light, divinity too big for a dragonstone to handle. Her mother had apparently made her dragonstone personally; lucky her. If she'd had some of the shards, she might be able to recreate it, perhaps; but those were lost to the dust of history, lost when Nemesis had struck her down and then banished her.

(A voice whispered in the back of her skull, _he showed you mercy. He had your life in his hands and he let go. He gave you mercy you did not deserve... _A voice that she thought she'd silenced, one horrified at what she had done, echoes of a conscience that was. She ignored it, as she always had, ignored that it sounded- just a little- like her mother's voice.)

Ah, well. Regrets of a millennia could be ignored; she'd had long enough practice at it. She sighed.

“ Your tea, your Grace,” said Cyril, depositing it nearby- not so close she risked bumping into it, not far enough away that she'd have to get up. Cyril was one of the few human servants she'd ever had who was actually worth a damn. She took a calming sip.

“ Thank you, Cyril,” she said, sighing. Some combination of frustration with her work and appreciation for this human servant drove her to speak. “ I'm just irritated by my lack of progress. The stones aren't able to absorb the energies, it's too much for them. If I had some way to dull the effect for just a little while, I think I could get them stable- I'm sure the energy will spike, then level off. It does that for every _other _kind of dragonstone. I just don't have anything that can survive the spike. Though it would be nice to have a stronger stone of some kind... perhaps I will experiment with star sapphires again, they showed _some _promise.”

Cyril pondered that as Seiros closed her eyes and put her hand over her forehead, rubbing at her temples. This human body was always aching, and headaches were the worst of its many frailties.

“ Admittedly this is more of a hobby than any real effort, now; I will have my mother's Crest Stone, soon enough, and ascend to take her place, as I must. There must be a Goddess in this world; with my mother's absence, everything has went... wrong.”

Cyril knew the truth about her- that she was Seiros- so it was alright to speak before him. Given what she'd saved him from in the depths of one of House Goneril's pens, his loyalty was beyond question; if it wasn't for the fact she'd miss his services if the process failed, she'd have made him a Hierophant already.

That and the process to _make _a Hierophant took two years. She'd miss his services that entire time, with no proof that he'd come out the other end intact.

“ Mistress,” Cyril said, hesitating a moment before continuing in a halting tone. “ I have... taken the liberty of observing your work for years now, and- and I apologize for overstepping my boundaries, but I think I might have a... a few suggestions.”

She cracked an eyelid open at him, and quirked up an eyebrow. What?... “ I thought you were illiterate?”

“ I was,” Cyril said, “ but I asked Claude to teach me. I have been studying for the last five years- I'm not good with numbers or magic, but I'm extremely dedicated to the work and I've done a few experiments on my own time and... I'm sorry, I know these notes are private, but it hurts you so much, Mistress. I-”

“ Wait,” Seiros said, removing her hand and regarding him with both eyes open now, truly _seeing _Cyril, the way she hadn't in a long time. “ Are you telling me you've been through my work?”

“ Yes, Mistress,” Cyril said, and hung his head miserably. “ I'm sorry.”

“ Well,” Seiros said, as she pondered that. Normally she'd just kill any human who looked at research, who would _dare _presume to... but it was Cyril, who she trusted with much. Almyrans were the only humans she found even semi-acceptable, the nation being hers- well, except for that part Nader ran, that damned rebel king, whose ancestors had kept the eastern half of the kingdom free of her and her faith for generations, who kept to the old ways of fire rituals and purifying religion.

But short of that, Almyra was hers, and Cyril was hers, more than any Almyran... and... well, it wasn't like _she _was getting anywhere. What harm could it do? Even her mother had assistants, back in the day.

“ What suggestions did you come up with?”

“ Mistress?” Cyril said, daring to risk a look up at her- saw her smiling sardonically at him.

“ You could hardly do worse than failure,” Seiros said, with some bitter amusement. “ As that is all I've managed to achieve, well, I want to hear your thoughts. I tried multiple stones already, but I can't get them to focus together.”

“ There may be a way to make them work as one,” Cyril said, a smile breaking out on his face. “ And even if that fails, I've got... oh Mistress, I've wanted to help you with this for so long! I've got notes on all kinds of things- I think I've even got a way to make the Hierophant process faster!”

“ Do tell,” Seiros said, with a low, interested growl. If it didn't work, she lost nothing.

But if it worked...

-

Eventually, both their tears ran dry, and it was time to talk. To talk of many things, Edelgard and Petra- but the other officers deserved to hear it as well, so it was time to leave the tent and rejoin the world. Edelgard rose on shaking legs, and Petra did too, and they laughed as they got up, almost sick with the joy of being together again.

Edelgard had lost her family twice in one life, first in Brigid and then at Garreg Mach; but the second wound was healed, Petra was returned to her. The happiness of it was such a terrible sweetness that it was almost sharp, pierced her chest with pain; it lanced the boil of grief, let her begin to drain her sorrows out.

They made themselves briefly presentable, and it was a miracle, how easily they fell back into the old routine- Petra assisting her, Edelgard helping her, for just a second five years had not passed and they were emperor and retainer, as they had always been. Even the new wound of Edelgard's eye was treated with Petra's usual casual efficiency, the eyepatch gently removed, ointments applied to the empty orbit. Linhardt had removed her eye, all those years ago, after realizing he couldn't save it; better the clean wound of professional surgery than risking infection, he'd told her when she woke up.

( Professional surgery... and it really had been, despite the fact that Linhardt had been so young. They had all been teenagers then. Sometimes it catches Edelgard, to realize that she is so _young_; twenty-two. She feels ancient, she feels the burden of all eternity on her back. How in the world can all her life have fit into only twenty-two years?)

The eyepatch was gently replaced. Edelgard smiled at Petra when it was done, and hugged her again, the taller woman laughing, Edelgard relishing in the feel of her warm and alive, and Petra's own arms a strong counterpoint on her.

Then it was time to go. They should all sit down and talk- and Edelgard was starving, she belatedly noticed. Combat worked up quite an appetite. She hoped they hadn't missed dinner.

They emerged from the tent to find Annette still on guard. The former Blue Lion smiled at them.

“ Hey!” she said cheerfully. “ You guys... ok?”

“ Better than I've been,” Edelgard replied honestly. Petra laughed.

“ I'm back, finally,” she said.

“ We're glad to have you back,” Annette said, smile widening. “ We got a lot to talk about- but I'm starving, so if we could hustle over, they're just now starting to get dinner ready. It's a bit late, but they were seeing what we could nick from the Alliance supply convoy- they apparently up and abandoned most of it once the tide turned!”

That was... that was incredible news. Edelgard had paid attention when Flayn told her of her ancestor's tactics, and now she shared something else with her famed progenitor- she was a bandit, too. Thievery was the great friend of the rebel, and had kept them fed and in the fight when all others had abandoned them.

“ How much has Hubert tallied up?” Edelgard asked- and then another thought occurred. “ How much are the Lions taking?”

“ We worked that out,” Annette said. “ Dorothea and Dimitri cut a deal- we get first pick of medical supplies, since apparently the Kingdom Grand Army is, in Dimitri's own words, 'drowning in healers', and after that we've got a list of who gets priority for what. There's a whole lot of thought behind the list, for how it works; Hubert and Ashe, of all people, worked it out, apparently he's the Kingdom's quartermaster now? Anyway, we worked out who else gets what, that's the long and short of it. Though Hubert told Dorothea she needed to talk to Felix about something- something to do with the supply amount? I wasn't sure, I just overhead them gabbing.”

“ Dorothea and not Edelgard?” Petra asked. Annette, who'd plainly forgotten that they tried to keep others from knowing of Edelgard's condition, briefly panicked before her Emperor intervened.

“ I have not been myself,” she told Petra. “ After Garreg Mach, I... I have not been in the best condition to lead. Dorothea is the true leader of the rebellion, not me. I'm merely a figurehead.”

Petra turned her around, hand on her shoulder, looking her in the eye.

“ You are okay with this?” Petra whispered to her, quietly. Her other hand went to her sword. “ They have not held you against your will, have they? I wouldn't think they would do that, they're good people, I'd have thought that Hubert, at least, would not do that, but five years is a long time, and people change...”

“ No, Petra,” Edelgard said, and almost laughed. From an outside perspective, she had put the situation rather... unkindly. “ Petra, I have... I lose my mind, Petra, from time to time. I retreat inside myself- there are times, too many, where I cannot lead. Not always. But often enough that someone must take up the slack...”

She smiled at her sister, put her arms on her shoulders, squeezed tight.

“ They have supported me, Petra, they keep me alive and together. The Eagles have taken _care _of me, Petra, they are why I am here to see you at all. I am trying to be better- I am recovering- but I... I will slip, Petra. That is how wounds of the mind are. I will slip. And when I do, the Eagles will do what they have always done- keep me alive. Keep me breathing. I owe _everything _to Dorothea and the others.”

Petra stared her hard in the eye, and what she saw there confirmed the words as truth, and she nodded, satisfied.

“ Alright,” she said, releasing her sword and Edelgard in one go, turning to Annette, who was busy mentally cursing herself and had missed most of the conversation.“ It's alright, Annette. The secret is safe with me.”

Annette let it out in a sigh. “ I mean, there was no way to hide it from you, I mean, _especially _not from you, and it's not like most of the troops don't kind of know anyway, but... yeah. Alright, let's go eat, and if anyone asks, I didn't say anything about anything.”

They all three laughed at that, and headed off to the cooking fires. The smell hit long before they got there, rising above the general camp smells of sweat and exertion, cleaning oils and antiseptics; a smell of warm smoke, thick and heavy with hot spices, roasting beef, the grain-sweet scent of freshly made cornbread, the delicate strawberry aroma of watered-down Adrestian wine.

Edelgard's stomach rumbled as they reached the tables. Great long tables, disassembled and packed in wagons when not in use, where the Eagles ate when at camp. Meals were taken together, at the rebel camp. Unity was a commodity so precious that even gold could not buy it, and eating with their troops was part of how the officers showed that they were all in this together; no fine officer's dishes did they take in private quarters. They ate what their soldiers ate, and thus suffered with them in privation and celebrated with them in plenty. Dorothea's idea, as so much was.

Dorothea... _Dorothea_. That conversation was coming, and Edelgard longed for it as much as she dreaded it. Should Dorothea reject her... she would... not be able to contest her decision. She was sure she had been a terrible burden on Dorothea, and not much help in return, these past five years; she could only hope that Dorothea would forgive her all her troubles, that Dorothea still saw something worthy in her to love despite her failures.

But... that was for later. For now, best to fill the stomach. The officers sat in the middle, where all could see them. Raphael, big as a mountain, sat next to Linhardt and Caspar on his left, and Byleth on his right; opposite them was Dorothea, Ferdinand and Bernie on her right and Hubert on her left.

Edelgard approached, getting an unexpected cheer from her personal guard, who sat- ragged and wounded from Cichol's unit- at a table near the center. Mae in particular waved at her, a smile on the big girl's face, and Luke raised a mug.

Edelgard waved back, a little shyly. She'd never been praised like this, before... but of course. She had been the Emperor, aloof and distant- that's how they saw it, anyway, when she was in the ashes. She hadn't ever saved their lives before, or even spoken their names...

She... she couldn't do that, not ever again. Or at least, as little as her own willpower could manage it. She wondered if there was medicine for this, magical or mundane; there were vulneraries and healing magic for broken bones, why not elixirs and spells for broken minds? There was no reason there couldn't be.

Perhaps- if this war be won, if the throne in Enbarr became _hers _again- it would be something to put gold into, something the Crown could invest in. She couldn't be the only one suffering from ghosts and hallucinations and the ashes. It could bring peace to many, if there was a salve for an inner wound...

But enough of that line of thought. Do what needs be done, and if your ass finds itself in a golden seat in the future, then think those thoughts. Edelgard sat down next to Raphael, Petra next to her, Annette moving over to sit with Hubert next to Dorothea.

“ Edelgard- and Petra,” Dorothea said, shaking her head in wonder. “ Petra, I... I can't believe you're alive.”

“ I can't believe I'm finally here,” Petra replied, and a smile lit up her face. “ It is so good to see all of you. I've heard so much...”

“ We have, too,” Hubert said, his hand reaching out unconsciously for her; she took it in hers, and he was surprised at the touch, some part of him still disbelieving the evidence of his eyes, still sure this was an insubstantial phantom and not really her. After a moment, he continued, “ I... I kept up with all the news about the Ghost of Brigid. Even after we held a funeral for you, I... I hoped. I prayed.”

Petra clutched his hand tight. “ A funeral?” she asked, voice tight.

“ We figured we'd never find your body,” Ferdinand offered, since Hubert. “ We... Flayn presided. She was Saint Cethleann, after all, so we had her perform your funeral rites and buried some of your old clothes, they were all we had left of you...”

He paused. “ I... my Goddess, Flayn. She's Saint Cethleann. And Rhea's Seiros... you weren't here for any of that. You missed all those revelations, and probably some stuff I'm not even thinking of. You've... you've missed a _lot_, Petra.”

Petra nodded, even as she filed those revelations away for later, when she could properly examine them. Now was no time to lose focus. “ You need to catch me up- and I'll tell you what I've seen as well. Mostly I've just heard... rumors. Stories and names.”

“ We heard the same,” Hubert said. “ You were called the Ghost of Brigid, and other things...”

Petra gave a sardonic grin. “ Ghost of Brigid... always kind of liked that one. Heard myself called the Phantom of Enbarr, the Memory of the Tragedy... much like all of you, I seem to have acquired a multitude of names.”

“ Yeah, but you didn't get a song,” Caspar drawled, and Linhardt rolled his eyes.

“ Please, love, don't- don't remind me of the goddamn song,” he said. Byleth snickered as Dorothea mock-pouted at him and Annette puffed up.

“ I wrote you a lovely song!” Annette said.

“ It's not every day you get a song written that rhymes Linhardt and heart,” Dorothea said with a grin.

Linhardt sighed.

“ Raphael, do you have any of that good Faerghus vodka you snatched while we were at Arianrhod?”

Wordlessly, the big man passed the half-full bottle from his bag to his favorite drinking buddy. Linhardt uncorked it and downed a massive swig.

“ Ah, yes,” Linhardt said, exhaling happily as it burned his throat. “ Now, when this bottle is done, I shall remember nothing of the Ballad of the Merciful, and all will be right with the world again.”

“ I think it's cool you got a song,” Caspar said, shrugging as his lover shook his head.

“ It has to be a good song before it's a point of pride,” Edelgard commented, and eyes turned to her- this was faster than she usually recovered after a battle.

“ Nobody appreciates my music,” Annette said with a sigh.

“ I always liked the one you used to sing about cleaning,” Petra said. “ The one that was actually about Manuela.”

“ It wasn't about Manuela, it was just a song about cleaning!” Annette protested, as she had for years- and was summarily ignored, as such protests always were. “ Death of the author doesn't apply when you can just ask me, guys!”

“ I have missed a lot,” Petra mused as Caspar laughed. “ For example, Dorothea, where is your hat? I remember how picky you were about it, how you never felt fully dressed without it!”

Dorothea laughed. “ Lost it two years ago. And I miss it, let me tell you- I've learned how valuable hats can be, out in the field. That hat kept my head dry through many a rainstorm.”

Cheerful laughter, and Petra wanted to just sink into the easy flow of the conversation... but she steadied herself. There was information she'd learned that she had waited years to deliver. “ My fellow Black Eagles,” she announced, silencing them as they turned to listen, “ I've been to Enbarr. I have things I must tell you.”

“ What is the capital like?” Dorothea asked, instantly alert, her hands reaching up to adjust a hat that was not there. “ We roam all over Adrestia, and even into Faerghus and the Alliance, but we avoid the coast... we learned that early on, at great cost. The Alliance maintains tight control over the most densely urban areas of Adrestia, and anything with a connection to the sea can be reinforced too quickly for us to combat. Even now, strong as we are, I would not relish attempting to assault the south... so any news you bring would be most welcome.”

“ I thought you might have trouble learning of anything down there, so let me inform you. There's a resistance among the people there,” Petra said. “ Nothing like this, since most of the nobility capitulated to the Alliance and Rhea's dragons... but the common folk paint your symbol on walls and work in defiance of their masters. You inspire so many, from all walks of life, to paint black wings on their chest and go forth to fight for freedom... and I have the names of many traitors. The rebels in Enbarr asked me to make it. It's a list of everyone they spoke of who'd helped the invaders in, though it was primarily seven major noble houses that really brought Adrestia low- seven who had been planning this for a long time.”

The Brigid once-princess sighed.

“ The rebels told me how it happened. Enbarr was invaded by land, sea, and air almost the instant the war began, a surprise attack. From the descriptions of survivors, Enbarr would have been hard-pressed to throw the attack back at its best... but the effort was never made. The seven traitorous families and their allies opened the gates and themselves killed anyone who tried to fight. If they'd stayed true and fought, maybe Enbarr would have lasted... but their betrayal made defending the city impossible. The battle was over in a matter of hours.”

“ Goddess,” Dorothea said, sighing. “ Of course it was treachery. Claude's a smooth talker and he's not stupid. Why fight someone when you can corrupt them?”

Her fellow Black Eagles nodded as Petra continued.

“ True... but he didn't get everyone. Not all the major families betrayed Adrestia. Your family stayed true, Caspar; and... I'm sorry, I don't know if you know what happened...”

“ Tell me,” he said, the bluenette brave in the face of all danger, physical and emotional both. “ I... when I heard Enbarr fell, I knew what had most likely happened. And we've heard a few things, over the years, we're not totally clueless. I know my uncle died...”

Petra nodded. “ Both your father and your uncle, Randolph, perished in the fighting. Nobody was sure what happened to your father, but Randolph died on the steps of the Imperial Palace, trying to keep them from getting inside...”

Caspar nodded grimly. “ I heard. Heard a dragon got him...”

“ Not just any dragon,” Petra said. “ Macuil himself. He... I will not go into detail, but Randolph died a hard and terrible death, Caspar, before the entire city. Macuil was... cruel.”

Caspar scowled as Byleth tapped her chin.

“ Macuil... Flayn's told us a bit about him. One of the old dragons... different from these younger ones,” Byleth offered in her monotone. “ More dangerous...”

“ If we run into him, I'll kill him, too,” Caspar growled. “ They don't call me Caspar Dragonslayer for the hell of it.”

Linhardt gripped his hand tight, and Caspar clutched it, grateful for the touch, as Dorothea redirected the conversation while Caspar wrestled with his anger.

“ We heard some of that, too,” Dorothea said. “ A few of Enbarr's survivors have made it out to us, over the years. As I said, the southern coast is death for us, so we avoid it.”

“ Then it is good I join you- I was mostly in that area. And, Caspar?”

“ Yes?” he ground out.

“ Not all the news is bad. Your aunt, Fleche- she lives. She is one of the heads of Enbarr's rebellion.”

“ Little Fleche?” Caspar said, feeling the ache in his heart ease a little. “ She's alive? And helping run a rebellion! I didn't think she had it in her.”

“ Yes,” Petra said. “ She was alive when I left her... though her brother's death has... she talks to him, sometimes. I'm not sure she's aware of it. Still, she's focused enough, and there is no fiercer fighter, when the underground of Enbarr must tangle with Alliance forces.”

Talking to her dead brother... more people, Edelgard thought, who needed help like she did, who saw ghosts. Her idea, of a place to learn how to heal these wounds, grew firmer in her mind. Someone had to do it... and it would be nice, once this war was won, to devoting her efforts not to killing people, but to healing them.

“ Poor Fleche... she always did worship the ground Randolph walked on...” Caspar said mournfully. “ But... at least she's alive.”

Petra continued, tone regretful. “ Caspar is not the only one who has lost family. Ferdinand, I'm sorry, I... I don't know if you've heard...”

“ I know my father is dead,” he said to Petra, appreciating her attempted gentleness. Four long years since he'd had definitive proof, and the wound still rankled; for all his disagreements with the man, he had still been his father. “ It's... I know.”

But there was still a question to ask. “ We have heard many variants of his death; what is the truth, if I may ask?”

Petra paused a moment, all this talk of dead family bringing up memories, her own murdered family flashing through her mind; she squeezed Hubert's hand in solidarity, and he returned that warm, calming grip, even as Edelgard put a hand on her shoulder too, steadying her.

When she could speak again, her voice was low and clear.

“ At least I can make sure you know he died well and with honor, cold as I know that comfort is. The rebels I talked to spoke of him highly, Ferdinand; he was in the Imperial castle when the invasion came. Randolph died to buy him time, you see; they'd set it up beforehand. Your father was in the archives, burning everything he could get his hands on, destroying records- records that listed everything the Alliance could have used in their war, secrets and blackmail and hidden funds and unknown armories. He kept them out of Alliance hands.”

“ He chose to spend his last moments not bending his knee, but serving Adrestia as best he could, making sure that the secrets of the Empire would never be in Alliance hands. When the new regent had him dragged in chains before the stolen throne, your father spat in his face and swore allegiance to Edelgard, before Hilda dragged him off to the chopping block and executed him.”

“ Well,” Ferdinand said, and felt a welling up of his grief inside his heart- but it was good, it was like having a boil lanced, it drew his suffering to the surface where it could be expunged. “ I knew he'd died well, the stories all agreed on that, but the details... I'd heard so many different stories. Knowing the truth _is _cold comfort... but cold comfort is still comfort.”

Tears sprang to his eyes, but he forced them down. He would weep later, in private, mourn his father, who had failed to be noble all his life, but who, at last and at the last, had upheld the duties of his position. Ferdinand had never been proud of his father, and the feeling was new inside him, strange; almost like happiness, that had eluded him for long years now.

“ Thank you, Petra. Thank you.”

Petra gave him a small, sad smile as he shook his head.

“ You mentioned a regent?” Ferdinand said. “ Who was this man that my noble father spat on, who would betray our people?”

“ I'd like to know, too,” Edelgard said. “ I've... always wondered who got Enbarr. We know a few of the regents, but like Dorothea said, we only ever get poor intel out of the south. I... always have wanted to know who was haunting my home.”

Petra looked at Bernadetta, who somehow _knew _what she was going to say, long before she said it.

“ I'm sorry, Bernie, but... the regent is your father, Count Varley, now Archduke Varley,” Petra said.

Bernie stopped even breathing, for a second, her father a demon of her past she had not thought of in years- years of joy, for her, the terrible, awful joke of her life is that this war has been the best period of her life, outer violence matched by inner peace. She has been... happy, like this, no matter the danger, it cannot compare to her father's voice or the constriction in her heart at remembering him, and Bernie had cheerfully chosen a willful amnesia, had forgotten him entirely, her own greatest victory.

But now, he's back, back in her new, beautiful life, and hearing of her father- of the betrayal he has enacted to Edelgard, who Bernie has served in her sanity and in her madness for half a decade- slammed a stone the size of a boulder through the glass house of her soul. Echoes of her father's words bounced through her head, all the things he'd said running together in a slurry of contempt and patriarchal anger.

(_stay in the chair be a good wife be still be silent obey me or be broken_)

Words that, to a child, were the pronouncements of God, as all parents are to their children... words that had hurt her, before.

But Bernie wasn't a child anymore. She was Bernie, she was Bernadetta, she was Fearless Bear... she...

She wasn't a child anymore. She looked at what had been done to her not with the broken heart of a daughter, who could not understand why her father hurt her, but with the clear eyes of an adult, and something rose inside her like the dawn.

_Rage_. Not mere anger this, but the hatred of a soul at injustice done to it, a brilliant fire that filtered through the dark parts of her heart and ran so hot she wondered if the others could see it, if they could see the red light inside her skull, shining out through her eyes and mouth. Hot, high hot heat, this light, a high noon that banished all the shadows in her heart and left her unafraid. No scared child was she, not anymore, not _ever again_; but proud and furious and full-grown.

She clenched her teeth. Her throat muscles bulged. Arms grown strong from the draw-release-draw of archery tensed so hard that she left an imprint in her table where her fingers pressed into the wood. Her stomach clenched so hard that she would have muscle spasms that night. Past her teeth and up her tightened throat, a single noise slipped past.

She _snarled_. Hearing the gentle girl make that sound was so disturbing that everyone plainly forgot what they were talking about, and Edelgard's hackles rose at the noise and the _sight _of Bernadetta; she had seen that look on few faces, that look of anger so bright that it could burn you, to stand near someone feeling like that. Edelgard knew that hate, had felt it herself, over the long years, though the ashes usually smothered it before too long.

She drew back, and she wasn't the only one; Caspar, unconsciously, had reached for one of the two hatchets he kept at his belt, sheer reflex at the sound of danger- though this danger wasn't directed at _them_.

“ I'll kill him,” Bernie said, looking straight ahead at nothing, and it came out not a threat, but prophecy. She relaxed visibly as she continued, turning her head to Edelgard. “ I... Edelgard, I abandon the house of Varley. I shed my hands of it. I declare my emancipation and my independence from a house of monsters and traitors. I am simply Bernadetta now, no scion of House Varley.”

“ Your services more than make up for your father's abominations,” Edelgard said quickly, if only because seeing _Bernie _possessed in a fit of rage almost made her duck back in the ashes, it was so frightening. “ I do not apply to you his failures, nor to your House his sins, if you wish to keep the name. You don't have to emancipate yourself.”

“ Regardless,” Bernie said, calming down- and not entirely voluntarily, it took so much energy, to hate so fiercely, to blaze so bright- and where the anger receded, sorrow and guilt, her old friends, took its place. “ I... I renounce his house and his name. I will not propagate anything of him to the future that I don't have to. He's a traitor. I... my Emperor, _Edelgard_, my life is yours, yours to use as you will, to keep or to throw away. I... I am not him. I am no traitor.”

“ Bernie, I know this,” Edelgard said, reaching a hand out- to the surprise of all gathered. Edelgard felt a bit annoyed at that. Goddess, how many reminders could she get in one day, of her failures as Emperor?

Bernie, after her own surprise, took her hand.

“ You have served me perfectly all these years, even as I have proven to be... rather less of an Emperor than I should have been,” Edelgard said, and noticed the looks her Eagles sent each other, at this open admission of her nature. “ In every way have you served me, in no way have you given me cause to doubt you. Why in the world would I think ill of you now, after everything?”

“ Why did my father hurt me?” Bernie said with a shrug. “ There is no answer, and therein lies the problem. It warps you, Edelgard, to have something like that happen, it... it's a wound inside, Edelgard, it blinds you in a way that leaves you without an eyepatch to tell the world you're blind. Blinds you to human decency, makes you assume everyone will hurt you if they can.”

More wounds on the inside. The idea turns real, in Edelgard's head. There has to be a cure for these things, there must be a place to study them and heal them, or, if healing cannot be done, at least make them bearable. People lacking legs had wheelchairs, people like her missing an eye had an eyepatch, why couldn't there be something for a wound on the inside?

“ I understand, Bernie,” Edelgard said.

“ I know you do,” Bernie said with a sigh. “ Better than anyone else here. I just... I'm sorry, I've interrupted everything going on. Continue, Petra, please.”

Petra looked at the others, and Hubert, who had withdrawn when Bernie snapped, reached his hand back out to her. She took hold of it, and he squeezed it as he spoke.

“ I... I hesitate to ask... I know there are bigger matters than my own, but I must ask after my own family, too.”

Petra smiled. This, at least, was good news.

“ Your family survived, sweet Hubert,” Petra said, smiling at him. “ They did not join the conquerors- but then, they wouldn't have, would they? They serve the throne as loyally as they have always have. Your father is one of the heads of Enbarr's network of secret patriots, and he is alive, as far as I know, though I did not meet him; he was apparently out on a smuggling run during the time I was in Enbarr. He has a boat now- the _Imperial Servant. _Him and his crew are on multiple wanted posters in Enbarr for piracy.”

“ My father, a pirate?” Hubert said, and an amused grin broke out on the dour man's face. “ Oh my.”

Petra grinned back and shrugged. “ Smuggling is a major business for them, it's how they keep bringing in coin enough to survive; and yes, it's about as amusing as you're imagining, watching them. They're quite an interesting bunch; the rebels in Enbarr are all pretty experienced criminals now, but very few of them were sailors beforehand, and even fewer had much experience as lawbreakers.”

“ So it's mostly boiled down to a few old criminals and pirates teaching the newer generation, which consists of former nobles and patriotic citizens and a few stray volunteers, all of whom have had to learn how to be thieves, rogues and able seamen- and the whole thing is based out of Enbarr's sewers. I saw a housewife prepare poisons the same way she'd have once prepared cake in a former sewage tunnel, watched former noblemen unload a boat of stolen weapons at the direction of a pirate, and heard Caspar's aunt launch into a flawless, heavily-accented rant in thieves' cant after some bit of bad news, then go straight back to proper Imperial while talking to me.”

Caspar snorted, amused despite everything at the idea of little Fleche going full-on brogue.

Petra laughed. “ It's... a bit surreal, to be honest. The whole Enbarr rebel movement is a mishmosh.”

“ Sounds like us,” Annette remarked, and the gathered officers laughed at the fair assessment, even Bernie and Ferdinand, stewing in their own thoughts.

“ Indeed,” Petra said. “ They're not the only group along the coast, either. I've met so many different rebel groups in the small places of the south, where even the Alliance's eyes can't find them... people who believe in you so much, who paint blackened wings on alley walls and do what they can in secret to keep the dream of Adrestia alive. Your people love you- all of you, not just Edelgard. I've even seen statues of Saint Cethleann, carefully protected- they're banned, now, in Alliance territory- and heard people talk of her tribe, returned to save Adrestia from their monstrous kin.”

“ How many groups are there?” Dorothea asked. “ We find small groups of dissidents from time to time in the areas we roam in, and that's where we draw most of our recruits from; but we've never been able to get good intel out of the coast. This is the first I've heard of there being a rebel movement at all along the coast. If there's enough of a homegrown resistance down there... then maybe retaking the south won't so impossible after all.”

“ The south is full of such groups,” Petra said. “ People join in droves, even despite the danger. I heard one Allied official call the place 'infested with loyalists', and he was not wrong. Church faithful, hiding their religion, Adrestian loyalists biding their time, dispossessed nobles and opportunists and simple peasant folk, even a few dragons who cannot stomach the terrors they are asked to inflict- all united only because they wish to see the Empire reborn.”

“ It's why I was so busy down there, for so long- I kept running into groups that needed my help, needed this official or that Alliance spy slain before they could reveal who was actually involved, or had some plan that needed the extra muscle only I could provide. Few of them are skilled soldiers- they mostly died in the fighting- but I encouraged the groups I dealt with to train if they could, to prepare in secret for the day their Emperor would call... and the sheer numbers would be telling in any conflict, untrained or not. A few managed to get their hands on Adrestian books of magic; they'll probably be the strongest support we'll see. Fire from novice hands is still fire, after all.”

( Edelgard noted that Petra said the strongest support _we'll _see. Not returned to them even a day, and she was already back to being one of them. This felt... natural, right, the way it should have been all along.)

“ So from what I'm hearing- vast numbers, but very little organization,” Dorothea said. “ Any group that stands out as a potential leader?”

“ Not down there,” Petra said. “ Not really. The groups are numerous, but scattered, secretive, and mostly small, nothing as organized as this- only the Enbarr network comes close, but it's hard pressed just to operate at all, it can't really afford to try to unify the coastal groups. The numbers in total are high, but each individual rebel group only has a few members. The Alliance keeps the people scared, which itself keeps any resistance weak and divided; it's terrifying, how efficient the Alliance is, how good they are at hounding the rebels, even as paranoid as they are. The things they let the dragons do- they're eating them, in some of the cities, devouring anyone they think opposes them...”

Petra shivered, and Edelgard stepped in.

“ They're using fear and terror to keep them in line; but that's a fragile backbone for a society. If we can shatter the Alliance's control, even temporarily, they'll emerge into the open,” Edelgard said, already seeing how it would work, a trick like the one they'd pulled at Arianrhod; but this would be a greater fire, this great pile of tinder that Petra had described was a bonfire-to-be that required only a match, and it would burn the infection of the Alliance out of all Adrestia.

“ And once they're out in the open, they'll combine forces and overwhelm the Alliance...” Dorothea said, following her Emperor's train of thought. “ If we can give them a place to rally, we can even gain control of them, direct their efforts to make them more effective than individual, scattered attempts.”

“ So much going on down there, in the capital and out of it,” Raphael said, shaking his head. “ But... well, that's not where we're heading, at the moment.”

“ Where _are _you heading?” Petra asked.

“ North, to Saint Cethleann's tribe,” Edelgard said. “ We intend to bring her older tribe back into the fold.”

Petra nodded- but then, finally, came the booming voice that all gathered there were waiting to hear.

“ It's cornbread and chili!” the camp's head cook announced grandly, to a round of cheers. He was whip-thin, unusually for a chef, a Dagdan named Hanzou who claimed to be an assassin by trade. According to him, he'd learned to cook for a job and found a new calling. His stories seemed too absurd to be true- claimed he'd fought bird-women and men made out of metal- but he was an excellent fighter, sneaky as a rat, and his cooking skills were almost as good as Edelgard's memories of Dedue and Mercedes' culinary delights.

His fellow camp cooks began passing out bowls and the ale that came with every meal, getting everyone fed. Edelgard still had no idea how Dorothea had managed to set this up, but eating with her soldiers like this, for at least one meal a day... well, that wasn't so bad. Hanzou continued, gums flapping in the endless patter that fell out of his mouth whenever he wasn't paying attention.

“ The chili's made with sweet Adrestian peppers for some kick, because you Adrestians like that shit, and the cornbread's fresh! The chili's got a secret ingredient- it's beef, good, freshly killed beef! We didn't even have to steal it this time- the beef's a gift from our Kingdom friends. And, of course, for you manaketes who can't handle heat, I've already made accommodations, so come on up and grab your bowls. You non-Adrestians, suck it up, hot food is good food and good for you!”

There were still things to say, of course. Things to say in private; apologies, for things she has not done. Words to Dorothea that had waited too long to be said... so many things still to be said and done.

But the bowl of chili before her was hot and sweet, the meat filling, the cornbread a good sop for the soup, and the ale just alcoholic enough that it had some flavor. Life as a rebel had taught Edelgard the many tastes of poverty and plenty alike, the taste of acorn and grubs holding off starvation, the fine whisper of aged wine on the palate after a successful raid, and she knew that what she had, right now, was something to be grateful for- to be eating a good meal in the company of her friends, of the people she loved.

There would be tomorrow, for more talking. For tonight, for right now, at least, she was fed, and happy, and the ashes a quiet thing in the distance of her mind; for the first time in too long, she was at peace.

So when she heard a nearby soldier say grace to the dead Goddess, Edelgard, on a whim, murmured her own prayer of thanks, and meant it.

-

Byleth felt a warm... _something_, brushing up against her inner self, a bright and warm thing like a ball made out of gratitude and joy. It was not the only one; she felt other things, swimming from the greater sea of the world around her into the inner ocean of Byleth's self, things ranging from angry darting curses to dark, desperate pleas to amused and sardonic oaths; all things that touched her, inside, stretched and uncurled muscles she hadn't even known she had, releasing a fist she hadn't noticed she was clenching.

Even as she ate, she pondered these strange feelings, these entities, these... whatever they were, that filtered into whatever it was that Byleth had that passed for a soul, she an empty thing of night made to hold the essence of the morning. She'd felt this before, ever since she woke up, but had told no one; what good would it do? Byleth was unique, nothing like her in all the world. There was no one who could guide her- even if her father had been alive, he would not be able to help her in this. He was human, after all- and Byleth... just wasn't.

It was something she tried not to dwell on, this dark emptiness inside her, or the bright power of Sothis that was part of her now... tried not to dwell on how lonely she felt, even amongst her once-students, who had become her friends. Their acceptance was a comfort, but the love of kith could only go so far, for a creature like her, that had no kin in all the world...

She missed the little green ghost...maybe she would have been able to guide her... but Byleth thought that, maybe, she wasn't as gone as she thought. For every now and then, ever since she learned about Seiros, Byleth thought she could hear... sobbing, in the back of her skull.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have, ONCE MORE, split a chapter in two.
> 
> FUCK IT, I am giving myself 10 Chapters so I can stop raising the number every time. No idea if we'll actually hit 10 but this was originally supposed to be three chapters long so AHHHHHH
> 
> Much thanks and love to my reviewers! If you have any questions, ask in a comment, or ask me at my tumblr, https://mr-laugh.tumblr.com/!


	6. The Sleep of the Just and the Wicked Alike

**The Sleep of the Just and the Wicked Alike**

Byleth dreamed.

Voices. Harsh. Grating. Arrogant. _Cruel_. Little figures dancing, burning, wars, horrors and atrocities, all presided over by green-haired monsters whose sadism was unmatched... all save one. A littlest one, not like the others, mocked and hurt for being the youngest, who looked upon the little figures and felt a terrible empathy with them, for she was a littlest, too.

An escape. Fleeing across endless, glorious darkness, that was so big that it gave her room to escape even her vast tormentors, heading towards a shining star, a world with life, where life could be made; she would be good. She would be better than her progenitors. As she slammed into the world, fire trailing off of her like glorious wings, she knew that _this _could be her home, that she could build a life in this place, that she could make so many things.

There was already intelligent life here, and she adopted their shape, she was desperate to adopt not just their shape but their words and their tongue and the race entire, she wanted to adopt _them_ and be kind to them, be a good mother to children that weren't hers or anybody's except the random chance of chaos and the world, prove to herself that she was not like those who were cruel to her.

And in time, she will create life of her own, and her firstborn will be so beautiful, when she opens her eyes she will be so _proud _and so _happy_; and she will name her daughter Seiros. She will love her, she will be good to her, she will not be cruel like her own mother. She will be good to this daughter of hers. She will teach her a thousand things, words and languages and magic and shapeshifting, and even when they eventually fight, as people always fight, she will keep that love in her heart, and her daughter will love her back- and they will always, always forgive each other.

Always.

(_ Seiros I'm so sorry_)

Byleth woke up crying in the middle of the night, but the tears that ran down her face weren't hers.

She tried to go back to sleep, and after an hour of fighting with herself, finally managed it... but something told her it wasn't over, not yet, not yet.

-

Felix woke up terribly early the morning after Gronder Field, a legacy of younger days spent training obsessively. He sighed as he tried to wrestle himself back to sleep, a task he had gotten better at, over the years. Once, he would have risen before the sun, to break training swords against mannequins, to subsume himself into fighting; but that had been another life, before the war, before the Alliance murdered his brother and his father both in a single battle.

Thinking of them hurt, the way it always had. If it had happened when he was younger, it would have broken him, he was certain; he had always been a brash, angry young man, tempered only by Glenn, who was so strong, and so noble, that even the angry, fight-loving younger Felix had to look up to him, had to at least act human just so Glenn wouldn't be disappointed in him. Felix had never listened to his father, but his brother had been a calming influence on a younger man badly in need of one.

( His father, whom he had never listened to in life, whose lessons Felix tried so hard to follow after his death. It was not his father's fault that he had been so pig-headed in his youth; for all that he had once mocked Dimitri as a boar for his reckless daring, between the two of them, Felix would always more closely resemble that blind, savage beast.)

That task had fallen on his friends as the years wore on, but it had been his brother he always held in the highest respect. Had he been younger when Glenn died, he would have thrown himself into his cynicism and his fury; and both his brother and his father dying would have ruined him entirely. He would have become a swordsman in the most literal sense imaginable, a sword's man, he would have been a man whose only purpose was to wield a sword.

But... he had been older, when they died. It had taken their deaths to finally break through to him, to get him to stop being as monotonously focused as he had been, to, at last, embrace his responsibilities, and grow up.

( He hoped he had not made a mess of it. He hoped they were proud of him, wherever they were.)

...Such thoughts were not conducive to going back to sleep, so he sighed and arose, sitting up in his bed. If he must be up, he must be up; he had won that battle more often than not, these last two years, but winning more often than not still implied losing, from time to time, and yesterday's victory in battle would not be matched today with victory over habit.

His tent was not the sparse thing his room had once been. Service as Dimitri's retainer was a paper-intensive thing, and he'd had a desk set up on one wall that practically groaned with its own weight; requests to be reviewed, letters read or ready to be sent, orders Dimitri wanted him to make, orders that Dimitri needed to see, orders that Felix could take care of without needing to bother his king, equipment manifests and security reports and all the thousand pieces of paperwork that made up the lifeblood of an army.

It wasn't like he wasn't familiar with the job; even back at Garreg Mach, Felix had helped Dedue out when the job of retainer began to overwhelm him, for the son of bakers and chefs was, through no fault of his own, ill-prepared for the task of managing a prince's work schedule. It had been Felix, ironically, who had taught Dedue not the art of warfare, but the much more terrible and necessary art of bureaucracy, a task Dedue had, eventually, excelled at, as the big man excelled at so much he turned his capable hands to.

Still, in time, when Dedue and Dimitri had married, it had been inappropriate for him to continue as retainer; a husband should not be a secretary, and Faerghus was nothing if not conscious of should and should not be's, a land of roles and places.

So Felix had agreed to take over full-time, the only Blue Lion who could really do the work- except maybe Ashe, but he was such an excellent quartermaster that it would have been a shame to waste him as a general retainer.

It would be a shame to waste Ashe on anything, for that matter; Felix still remembered how the Blue Lions owed their escape from Garreg Mach to the former thief, to his skills and cleverness. Edelgard had saved Dimitri's life, but after she tore off on a one-woman wildfire rampage of vengeance for her lost eye, they had run, fleeing the storm of gold that descended on them. Their way had been blocked, the Alliance and their dragons had the monastery surrounded, but Ashe was smarter than them; his thieves' instincts guiding him after all this time to a hidden path in the sewers of Garreg Mach, one he hadn't known about, but it had felt... right, it was where nobles hid secret paths, in their cisterns and sewers, which he knew from his days raiding their mansions. He had guessed, and the guess proved correct enough that he escaped; he led them into sewage and out onto freedom.

Long days spent hunting at the monastery meant that, once they were outside the walls, he knew backwoods paths the Alliance could not follow him on, save a single squad led by Leonie that they'd managed to fight off, Felix's sword a sawblade in his hand as he hacked through screaming human lumber, Ashe and Leonie dueling with bows as the rest fought it out in desperate melee, back to back against an overwhelming number of foes, Mercedes right behind them throwing healing life into their bodies that they could keep up their furious defense.

The thief-made-knight had won, forcing Leonie to retreat, and the other Lions had won the hard press of the melee, though not before Leonie managed to take off Ashe's pointer finger with a well-aimed shot. After that, Leonie's squad had fled, carrying their wounded leader back; the Lions had turned west, and kept running. Ashe's skill at hunting and navigation not only got them home, but it let him catch enough game that they could eat on the way back home, having fled the battle suddenly and without provisions. Felix was alive today because Ashe had been there to save them- they all were.

Besides, it wasn't like Dedue wasn't busy; as liaison to Duscur, he had been constantly on the move, traveling back and forth between Fhirdiad and his distant homeland, drumming up support, a task at which he was so good that Duscur had sent countless troops to Faerghus' aid in this great war. In many ways, in fact, Dedue had been largely responsible for keeping the Kingdom in the fight at all, for without Duscurian support they would have folded. They shored up Kingdom weaknesses; Duscurians fought differently than Faerghi did, axes and heavy infantry, backed up by swathes of healers and enough healing poultices to bring a dead man back to life. They'd gotten doctors and healers and medicine enough from Duscur that Felix could have swam in a pool of elixir, if the urge hit him.

He'd heard Dedue say, back in innocent school days, that their warriors descended from lumberjacks, of all things, that the most prestigious of their military organizations had, once upon a time, been mere common woodfolk, lumberjacks and wise women, who happened upon the Queen of Duscur while bandits ambushed her, and fought in her defense. For that act of heroism, they had been uplifted, had become nobility, spawning a military order of protectors whose favored equipment had become standard in all of Duscur, and it elevated the woodswise women to the status of most prestigious of healers; Duscurian herbalists and alchemists were the best in the world, and only distant Morfis could compete with their healers.

It was a Duscur woman who had first put together the formula for an elixir, decades ago, and in modern times they had treatments for diseases that Fodlan had yet to even name- a potion to drink to remove sugar from the blood, a warm treatment that could cure common colds, a cold and dark lozenge that could slow and steady the beating of a weak heart when placed under the tongue.

Felix had seen their power himself, had seen what they had done for Ingrid, after her fall, though even the best doctors of Duscur would admit that Ingrid's recovery had been a miracle not of their own making; they had done their best, but the techniques they were forced to try by her injuries were too new, too experimental, too untested. Books were being written about her, he'd heard, and a sample of her blood had sold for millions to some alchemist's lab in Duscur. She'd auctioned it off to help the war effort, a year back, and he still felt odd about it.

Felix had always wondered, since he'd heard that, if some of Duscur's willingness to help had been simply because of how much like Dedue that story sounded. Felix was sure that much of Duscur's willingness to help was just the age-old unity of their nations, that they would have sent aid regardless, but Dedue... he had to look like those ancient heroes, to Duscurian eyes, the common man who saved a foreign prince and, for his courage, was eventually awarded a king's hand in marriage. Dedue sounded- when you looked at it with objective distance- almost like the chivalric tales of Fareghus, he almost didn't seem real; the commoner blessed to be a king, the low destined to rise high. Like... Dorothea, he supposed, who had changed so much in the last few years, who had went from street rat to opera star to this thundering general, who strode unharmed amidst carnage and spoke the tongue of storms.

Felix idly held his hand up, let a little lightning flicker along his fingers. He knew that language too- he'd changed, in these last five years. He could not be a master of faith, like his father, still a little too cold and rational for it... but he had taken up magic, after his father's death, and the same obsessive drive that had once led him to waste his life on swordplay had let him learn magic in record time. They needed that; neither Faerghus nor Duscur were lands of much sorcery, and with the loss of Mercedes, they'd had no one left who really knew much of it. Felix had thus effectively volunteered himself to the work, once he'd hung up his sword for good; he needed a weapon of some kind, and his newfound sense of responsibility left him only one real option. They needed a mage, so he studied magic.

There had been Annette, once upon a time, of course, but she had left to join the Eagles, back before any of them had known just how momentous a decision that would be. He was glad she was alive and doing well; that had almost been him, after all, he might have been the lone Lion amongst the Eagles. But for the grace of the Goddess, as someone had said, once, and then been echoed down all history; Byleth had actually approached Felix, in those days, hunting a physical warrior and going to the Kingdom's students first, their kind being experts at martial war.

He'd turned her down entirely because he liked fighting Dimitri, because in his youth, he was an asshole, a fact he'd had to come to terms with when all of House Fraldarius' burdens fell on top of him, all at once. He could have stayed the same, and let his father and brother's deaths mean nothing, or he could change, and... well. He could not claim to be a great lord, but he was doing alright, and he had to believe that meant something.

...Dear Goddess. He'd been sitting in his bed for fifteen minutes, just thinking. He really _was _tired as hell.

He shook his head to clear it of the past and got up out of bed, enjoying the southern warmth; Adrestia was a hot land, and unlike most of his fellow Faerghi, Felix actually sort of enjoyed it. He stretched, then sighed as he stared at his desk. It was _far _too early to worry about working through what was left on his desk. At least he was not a drinker, and had no hangover to go with his tiredness; a bit of coffee would wake him right up. Coffee was a bit of an acquired taste in tea-obsessed Fodlan, but work as Dimitri's retainer had a way of making one value the alertness the bitter drink brought.

He poked his head out of his tent. Ingrid was out there, of course, because Ingrid was not really a person, but some kind of absurd fairy tale knight come to life, right out of the stories, a trait she shared with Dedue and Ashe both; no wonder those three all got along so well.

She turned to him, all smiles despite the fact the sun had yet to do more than dimly light the farthest edge of the night sky. In the dim flicker of her low cooking fire, bouncing off of her chestplate, he could see a few of the mass of scars that riddled her face, the observable echo of the greater series of wounds that covered her entire body.

“ Good morning, Lord Fraldarius,” she said, all smiles. In the small campfire before her, a pot of coffee was boiling, and the smell was heavenly in the light breeze that played merrily over the Kingdom Grand Army's camp. Next to the black ambroisa was a fat and heavy skillet that contained the first round of Ingrid's breakfast, which Felix ignored; morning meals had never sat well on his stomach.

“ Hello, Ingrid,” Felix said. He wasn't even surprised at her efficiency; four years of Ingrid's impossibly loyal service had inured him to the fact that, as far as he could tell, his sister-in-law did not sleep, could predict his needs before he could, and was preternaturally good at deterring assassins. That last was important, because Claude was inordinately fond of sending assassins; Felix could not count the number of times he'd woken up to his faithful knight cheerfully informing him that she'd killed or captured a would-be murderer in the night. “ How are you this morning?”

“ Better than I've been in a long time,” she said, smiling at him as she poured a cup. It stretched the scars on her face in strange patterns. “ I... Lord Fraldarius, yesterday was _important_. I think the war's turning.”

He pondered that a moment, as she handed him the tin cup. He sipped his warm brew, as he thought about the victory they'd won, the sheer number of Alliance troops they'd killed and routed, the supplies they'd managed to recover- and found, to his surprise, that his old cynic's heart... agreed with her.

“ I think it is,” he said, and Ingrid's smile only grew wider.

-

Cethleann dreamed.

A memory it was, though with that hazelike quality of sleep. The aftermath of one of her first battles alongside Nemesis' new land of Adrestia, which grew every day as human kingdoms swore fealty to him, in return for his protection from Agartha and Seiros both. She had been wounded in the fighting, and was recovering- the wound wasn't serious, just a long cut down her side from the claws of another dragon. She'd known that dragon, too, remembered that he told bad jokes and liked to think himself clever... remembered laughing at one of those jokes, right as her jaws crunched down on his head and silenced his voice forever.

So she lay there, hurt, and tried not to think about how many people she'd grown up with that she was killing. That she was doing it for the right reasons was the only way she was able to keep going at all, that she _knew _she was doing the right thing in fighting for a day when dragon and human could live at peace with one another was her sole source of comfort and strength, and it did not dull all the pain of this horrific war.

No other soothing was forthcoming. Her fellow rebels and refugees had no healing magic among them, and they had no poultices or potions, had fled Seiros and her home in the Throat with nothing but their dragonstones and the clothes on their backs, escaping in the dead of night in hopes that Seiros' eye would be dimmed to their escape.

And... she could not speak of her pain to them. She had been, more or less by accident, appointed their leader, the girl who would not obey Seiros anymore had somehow ended up leading them, a prophet in the wilderness... and given her extreme youth, she knew how precarious that leadership was, how so much of what she did would be remembered by her followers, how fragile some of this was. Should she be open about her hurt, her pain, should she not present herself as a fearless, capable leader... she feared that some of those who were uncertain would turn tail again, would flee back to Seiros or, worse, seek to betray Adrestia first, which would destroy what tenuous alliance existed.

For her dream, for the better future she hoped for, that Sothis Herself had hoped for, she had to think of all these things, all the time, with no one to help her but Indech, and she could not lean on him too strongly, or she would be seen as weak. A tremendous, impossible burden... but it was incredible, incredible and _horrifying_, the things you could learn to live with.

She might ask her allies, but that, too, was barred to her. The Adrestians had healing magic, and some potions- though not many, it had been a while since the last raid- but none of them would help her. They were afraid of her; and after a year and a half of draconic violence, Cethleann could not find it in herself to be mad at them. They had offered to fight alongside her, and none of them had tried to betray her during the few skirmishes they'd had, her people were being allowed to fight as allies with the Adrestians, and it was more than the Agarthans would allow. It... would have to be enough.

How could she ask of these humans, so many of whom she'd killed in Seiros' name over the last year, for _help_? And if she did, and they said no... what message would that send, to her small following? It would make them seem lesser in the human's eyes, it would weaken what little trust they had in Adrestia.

So she was left without hope of help, and tried to toughen her heart to it. The wound was not fatal. She would heal, eventually. She would just... hurt, in the meantime. Hurt, and try not to whimper, and try not to think about her father, and the way he would care for her when she was sick, and _not _think of... of so many things.

And as she lay there, trying not to think of things, trying to sleep so the wound would heal faster, she felt more than heard the approach of one of the Adrestians.

She cracked open an eye. An older woman, a matron, approaching with a small basket, and the crooked, basic staff that the Adrestians had to use for their mages, nothing like the mighty, manufactured things the Agarthan wizards used- something half-scrounged, half-formed, much like the Adrestian army itself was, armoring itself with castoffs of Agartha... and castoffs of Seiros, too, Cethleann had to admit, what else would you call her and her followers?

“ Yes?” Cethleann rumbled after a moment, needing it to remember the words in a language she barely knew, and being thankful that the eidetic memory of dragons made the task simpler.

“ Do you need healing?” the woman asked. Cethleann fully opened her eyes, turned her great head to the woman.

“ I... you would heal me?” she asked, surprised.

“ Aye. We're allies, ain't we?” she said with a grin. Other dragons took note, and leaned in, watching from a distance, but the woman did not flinch underneath the weight of those stares.

Cethleann stared, too, dumbfounded for a moment.

“ Aren't... aren't you afraid?” she asked.

“ Terrified,” the woman replied honestly. “ And not least cause all your fellow dragons are staring at me like a fattened calf.”

A bit chastened, most of the dragons looked away, though Indech just laughed and continued to observe this strange human. The healer just kept talking.

“ Course, I'm more afraid of you- I lost my husband to teeth a lot like yours. To a thing a lot like you. Rose right out of the water and bit my fisherman husband in half. Would have got me and my kids too, save that I picked them up and ran like hell. Now, can I heal you, or does it not work like that for dragons?”

Cethleann, ashamed, lowered her head. “ I am... sorry for your loss. I apologize.”

“ Wasn't your teeth,” the woman said with a shrug. “ Or, hell, it might have been, I guess. You've fought us before, I heard someone say?”

“ Agarthans,” Cethleann said reflexively... but then, the Adrestians had served the Agarthans too, up until recently. “ I... yes. I've fought your people before... it might well have _been_ me. Where was this?'

“ A village ain't got no name,” the woman answered as she set her basket down. “ Not one a dragon would know, I reckon. I got some painkillers and a bit of faith, will that patch ya up?”

“ I... yes, but... why would you help me?” Cethleann asked, lost. “ I have murdered your people, I might have killed your husband...”

“ You're helping us now,” the woman said, as she pulled out a little bag of healing herbs and began to apply them to . “ And I was mighty scared of you, seeing you over here... but I don't much like thinking I'm a coward. And... you looked awful sad, laying there, breathing hard, trying not to hurt. I know what that's like. Watched my momma die of something that took months to kill, wasting away. She looked a lot like that.”

“ I... I don't know what to say,” Cethleann said. “ T-thank you.”

They were both quiet a few moments, as the woman spread the herbs and healed her, and relief slowly spread through Cethleann's body.

“ You sound young, girlie,” the motherly woman said.

“ I am,” Cethleann said, very quietly to her, aware of her listeners... and she had not meant to sound so... hurt, when she said it. Something between this woman's kindness and courage and the relief the herbs brought had left her too open, too honest, and her grief spilled out in her words.

The woman turned a sad gaze to her, and patted her great side.

“ If'n you need to talk, I'm pretty good at not telling secrets,” she said. “ Though I hope one of your secrets ain't that you're all secretly traitors, we're barely holding our shit together as it is.”

Indech, listening nearby, shot out a surprised laugh, and the woman turned a grin on the turtle as Cethleann gave him a reprimanding look.

“ Uncle!”

“ Sorry,” he said. “ I just... the idea of betrayal is _ridiculous. _Seiros wants to eat our livers, and Agartha wants to make weapons out of our bones. Not much advantage to betraying the only group that wanted to _talk_ instead of kill us.”

“ Does sound pretty stupid, you put it that way,” the woman said. “ Course, just cause it's stupid doesn't mean somebody won't do it, you dragons ain't no different from us when it comes to doing dumb shit.”

Indech was sent into hysterics at that. Say what you would of Indech, but he'd always kind of liked humans, and the sardonic human had a firm grip on his sense of humor. He finally managed to speak after a good minute of laughter.

“ I rather wish you were wrong, but you're not.”

The woman grinned at him. “ You're alright, ya big turtle. You know Nemesis had a hell of a go, or so I heard, getting you guys in... but for whatever it's worth, I'm glad ya'lls here. Nice to have dragons on our side, too.”

“ What's your name?” Cethleann asked, intending to seek her out later; it would be nice, to have someone to talk to, who would not... judge her. Who was neither her servant nor her superior nor her enemy but just a... friend.

Maybe this woman was a spy of Agartha, that was a fear she had- she knew so little, and she had been thrust so suddenly into this world of politics and espionage and war- but she had to talk to someone.

“ Name's Flayn,” the healer said. “ Flayn Hevring.”

_Flayn_...

Drowsily, Saint Cethleann turned over in her sleep in the Black Eagles' camp, smiling, remembering that brave woman, remembered long conversations with her and heroic deeds done by that motherly woman, and wondered- in that brief way we wonder things in our dreams- what had happened to her descendants.

( Somewhere nearby, Linhardt- whose family name is Hevring- slept the sleep of the dead, exhausted from the doctor's tasks he'd done all the night through, working his fingers to the bone so that the wounded of the Black Eagles would still be in the land of the living come this morning- and it was a testament to his hard-earned medical skill and healer's hands that, of those among the Black Eagles who had been injured in the Second Battle of Gronder Field, every single person tended to by Linhardt personally would not only live, but recover completely. Caspar, early riser, had slipped out without waking him, knowing how exhausted such work left him, and with one more fond look back at his sleeping fiance, took off to put his armor on and begin his shift of guard duty.)

-

After downing a cup of coffee, and then taking another mug as precaution, Felix dressed himself in the tent as Ingrid cooked and devoured her horrifyingly large breakfast outside, gluttony the one indulgence she had, though she had to eat slower these days with her ragged teeth. The simple robes of a scholar and a sage still felt odd on him, and he wasn't sure he'd ever not feel awkward, not wearing a sword... but he'd put the blade down when he inherited all the House, to remind himself that he could not be just a warrior any longer. The only decorations he bore were those that marked his station- Faerghus, as he'd thought this morning, was a place where position mattered, where declaring that position and living up to it were necessities of life.

He'd ignored those necessities for years, but now, in the Kingdom's darkest hour, he couldn't do anything that would damage Dimitri's position. A new king, only king because of his parent's illness, had issues of legitimacy, issues that had already caused him problems; House Charon was not the first noble house that had betrayed them for the Alliance, and much of the territory they'd lost in the East had been because, between the Duke of Dragons and an untested prince, too many barons, counts, and earls chose to throw their lot in with the Duke.

Felix would not fail Dimitri by adding onto those worries, by appearing to be anything less than the direct servant of royalty that he was. Respectability was a matter of showmanship, and while Felix had all the charisma of a falling log, he'd learned to at least dress well enough. The sash and cloak over his robes declared his House, his allegiance, and his status, and were enough like his own father's formal clothes that he felt... better, wearing them. His father had left a powerful legacy behind, one Felix would simply have to live up to as best he could.

When dressed, he finished off his cup of coffee, downing it swiftly and without complaint. Caffeine mattered, not the drink itself. That done, he put the cup down nearby where Ingrid would eventually pick it up for cleaning, and from his desk picked up the large folder that contained all of his notes and information, ranging from simple observations to currently active treaties to the names of every lord in Faerghus as well as their disposition. His right hand occupied itself with a vast tome- not of spells, but of laws, every law in Faerghus, from the king's heaviest proclamations to the lighter sentences of lesser lords.

When he stepped out, Ingrid was ready- because of course she was- and the two walked through the camp towards Dimitri's headquarters. Dimitri and Dedue almost certainly weren't awake, but Felix liked to be waiting for them at the conference table when they arrived, for the same reason that Ingrid tried to be there when he awoke; it was what a good servant did.

The distance was considerable; Felix had the idea to separate the leadership out, when they started this Kingdom Grand Army, to prevent all of the leadership from being overwhelmed in a single attack. It was better for everyone if the Kingdom's chain of command could not be destroyed in a single successful raid.

An unexpected benefit was that it let Felix get a feel for the camp when he headed over. He'd walked through many a camp in the five years of this war, and while most soldiers were asleep, that itself gave him a sense of the mood. After a bad loss, soldiers did not sleep well, the night was disturbed by the sounds of souls in distress, by weeping and grieving; and while there was some of that after a victory, sound sleep amongst the troops was the surest sign of a battle gone well.

And the camp, this early in the morning, rested peacefully under the blanket of stars that still lay over the world, morning just a lightening of the blackness at the moment.

As they neared the command tent, they ran into the only other Lion awake- Ashe, whose years as a burglar had made him used to odd hours, a skill that had helped him tremendously in his years as a knight. In his hands he carried a bag stuffed with messages and dispatches. Remembering his thoughts this morning, Felix's eyes flickered to where Ashe was missing the pointer finger of his right hand, the wound that had forced him to pick up lancework to supplement his wounded archery.

“ Hey guys!” the knight said, bright and chipper. “ Good early morning, I got the mail.”

“ Good morning, Sir Gaspard,” Ingrid said formally, and Ashe beamed at her for it.

“ Morning, Ashe. Anything of immediate concern or interest?” Felix asked.

“ Queen Mother Cornelia sent us a letter informing us that the Eagles were coming to help us,” Ashe said.

“ A timely and useful message,” Ingrid commented dryly, and the trio laughed quietly.

“ The Eagles precede their reputation, apparently,” Felix said, as the chuckling died down. “ What else does her letter say?”

“ It mentions that the Eagles saved her at Arianrhod,” Ashe said. He'd glanced over the letters himself, opening them and making sure there was nothing poisonous or lethal inside before he brought them to the others. He had people for that, of course, but he stood as the last line of defense for the Lions, and so he checked them all personally. “ The fortress would have fallen, save that the Eagles swooped in and saved them. She also details a... Hierophant? Something weird Claude's come up wit, alongside that preacher he keeps on retainer. You guys remember Marianne?”

Felix sort-of recalled her; he'd spent too much of his school days self-obsessed, seeking to be better than his brother at _something_, with swordsmanship his preferred method. She was... quiet, he thought?

“ Vaguely?” he said, shrugging. If he'd known how important his classmates would be, not just to his future but to all of Fodlan, he'd have been more sociable; hell, he'd barely paid attention to his fellow Lions.

“ I remember her,” Ingrid said. “ Hilda's girlfriend, if I recall correctly. Very religious... I met her when she was dragging a Golden Deer student away from Dorothea's RIA during that ridiculous song. ”

Ashe laughed. “ Oh man, I forgot about that! Ingrid the Unachievable, right? ”

Felix quirked an eyebrow; he didn't remember this. “ Wait, what song?”

Ashe kept laughing, as Ingrid pinched the bridge of her nose- or at least, what was left of it. An arrow had shaved off most of the front, fire had melted the rest of it into a single mass, and even the wonders of Duscur science had only been able to regrow so much of her ruined form, scalpels tearing new holes in the fused flesh so she could breathe, even as the strange and experimental medical treatments they tried undid her shattered form as best they could.

“ I turned her down, after she cajoled Edelgard and the Eagles into helping me deal with the worst suitor I'd ever had- the man tried to kidnap me,” Ingrid explained. Felix nodded- that part he'd heard. “ After that, Dorothea openly asked me if I was interested. I told her no, and she... she started a school club.”

“ The Rejected by Ingrid Association!” Ashe sang out, still laughing. “ The RIA!”

Felix's eyebrow began to achieve orbit. Ingrid chuckled a bit too, though she was still clearly embarrassed, scarred lips turning into a wry smile. “ She found the others I'd turned down. Dorothea had apparently written a song, and when her and the RIA saw me, they started belting it out. It was intended to be sad, but she was a bit drunk, and her accompanying choir of... I believe there were six people there... were all _very _drunk, so it came out much more enthusiastically than intended, was a bit of a waltz, honestly. Had a good beat.”

“ Catchy as hell, too,” Ashe said, before singing softly in falsetto, “ Ingrid, so unattainable, Ingrid, so unreeeeeeachable~ so unachieeeevaaaaaable~”

Ingrid slapped him on the shoulder, though gently. “ Hush, you! It was... it was a bit of a mess, Lord Fraldarius. Manuela arrived to see what was going on, but then she started drinking and singing along too, and after about the third round I think she forgot that I'd never turned her down? She cried and told me I was too beautiful for this world.”

Felix wrestled down a laugh at the mental image. Ridiculous, dramatic Manuela, who no one had seen since, who had died when Claude assaulted Garreg Mach- or at least, that's what Felix assumed, no one had found the body. Maybe Claude had buried her; she'd been his teacher, after all, and he was sometimes stricken with sentiment, particularly in comparison to Rhea, who was some... other thing.

“ So... Why didn't you ask the Lions to help you with this suitor? Dimitri would surely have helped,” Felix asked, and Ingrid shrugged.

“ I didn't believe Dorothea, Lord Fraldarius. She told me the man was a scumbag, said she'd dealt with him personally before and that he was slime. I thought she was exaggerating, but as it turns out she was, if anything, understating the problem; we ended up in a literal battle, with mercenaries on one side and the Eagles and myself on the other. I really _should _have asked Dimitri, I just... didn't believe it could be as bad as Dorothea said.”

She shook her head. “ I owe her my life.”

“ You'll have a chance to repay her, I suspect,” Ashe said, smiling at her. “ They're all alive- I still can't believe the Black Eagles are real. Seemed, I don't know, too...”

“ Fairy tale?” Felix offered, and Ashe nodded.

“ Like something out of those old chivalry books,” Ashe agreed. Ingrid grinned.

“ It reminds me of _Chronicles of Valkyrie_, specifically,” she said, and Ashe nodded enthusiastically.

“ Yeah, it's just like the scene where-”

“ Please, spare me, I beg of you,” Felix asked, before the two could go haring off about their common interests once more.

“ Sorry, Felix,” they both chimed in unison.

“ Thank you,” he commented. “ Now let's get in there, it does us no good to get up early if Dimitri arrives before we do. I want to read the mail over myself, at any rate.”

They strode into the command tent, a sparse and vast blue thing, enrace guarded at the moment by a few of their Duscur allies. Ingrid gave them a deep bow, honoring the people who had, beyond all hope of recovery, saved her life, before she held the flap open for Felix and Ashe, following them in and taking up her position standing behind Felix. He'd offered her a chair before, but she'd declined, said the scars on her legs itched if she sat too long, and she preferred to be ready at any rate.

Felix's own seat was next to Dimitri's, while Ashe took the one to Felix's left. Ashe handed over the letters for Felix to read, the correspondence mostly that relating to or for the Blue Lions; Ashe handled the bulk of the messages the army got through his own subordinates, Kingdom quartermasters having always fulfilled the secondary task of postmaster as well, but messages for those closest to Dimitri were handled by him personally.

Felix went down the letters with quick eyes, years of practice rendering him a swift reader, reading everyone's mail. If they wanted privacy, they could join a different army; not all of Felix's brusque nature had left him, and they'd gotten used to it as his way of protecting them.

One letter for Sylvain from his older brother Miklan, informing him that he was taking off on a raid into Alliance territory again, this time supported by Christophe of House Gaspard and the mighty knight Gwendal of House Rowe- apparently, he'd heard rumors of some rebel movement in the Alliance, rumors he thought worth checking up on, and he was using his discretion as Warden of the Northeast to look into the matter for Dimitri.

Miklan had included what little he had heard from his soldiers about this supposed rebel movement; that it was led by some Alliance noble who had found she could not stomach Rhea anymore, that it was located in the northwest of the Alliance, and seemed to be centered on a small village near a lake, named after the Saint of Dragons. Probably nothing, but Miklan had heard rumors they had dragons on their side, and that was just a little too interesting to ignore.

That was the first, and more business-like, half of the letter, conducted cleanly and concisely. The second half was Miklan continuing in more informal tone, which for Miklan meant that it was half swears. The first paragraph of that second half was spent informing Sylvain of how Gautier's lands were doing (“farms are doing fucking great”), of his hiring of a court mage for Gautier (“hired a Duscur alchemist, he blew the lab up twice on his first day, so _clearly_ I've made a great Goddess-damned decision”), and how Miklan's two children were doing (“the kids are going to be fucking giants, what the hell is Ladislava feeding them?”).

The second paragraph of the more informal portion was Miklan encouraging Sylvain to just ask Felix out already, something Miklan had done in his last three letters. He even had instructions on finding a Dagdan minister to perform the ceremony, albeit Miklan's version was half swears- “fucking ask him to marry you already so I can be your Goddess-damned best man before my balls rot off from old age and I have to go to a monastery to dedicate the rest of my life to spit-shining the Goddess' fat ass” was the specific terminology used.

Miklan had always been coarse, despite his upbringing- or, perhaps more accurately, because of it. Sylvain's father had been cruel, to his eldest, had placed unimaginable pressure on him, and in a spirit of rebellion Miklan had finally left voluntarily, cutting all ties... except one. Sylvain he'd kept in contact with surreptitiously, Miklan understanding the horrible pressures Sylvain would now be placed under as the new heir and, perhaps, feeling a little guilty that he had abandoned Sylvain to that pressure- or at least, that's how Felix interpreted it.

Miklan had become his own man, had formed a mercenary company by the most absurdly direct method imaginable- had wandered into the outlands and distant territories and found brigands and bandits, and personally pummeled them into human shape, forging from groups of disparate outlaws a single faction he named the Forgotten.

Miklan, nameless, had taken his band of former cutthroats, and he had led them to glory as a mercenary captain, somehow taking these lawless folk and turning them around through sheer force of will into a band of rough and honorable soldiers, with a reputation as shining as gold; it was said the Forgotten never broke a contract, that they never turned down a plea for help, that if you could not trust your nobility to save you, the Forgotten might do the job for free. Their names became heralded in every small village, and after years of such service they were spoken of in the same breath as other legendary mercenaries, from the Grail Mercenaries to the Blade Breakers.

Sylvain had been told a place for him was available in the Forgotten, if he needed to flee his home, and knowing he could walk away had kept Sylvain sane as the heir of House Gautier, for all the years it took him to become his own person; had helped him become that person, knowing that, if all else failed, Miklan had a place for him, he could join his older brother and be free of his burdens.

The war had changed things for everyone, but for Miklan, the change had been more dramatic than most; already well-regarded, his Forgotten had proven themselves one of the few forces capable of challenging the Alliance's control of eastern Faerghus, holding the line for the Kingdom where no one else could, even slaying dragons at a time early in the war when such a feat was held to be near impossible. Miklan had even found a wife in the chaos, some Adrestian officer who had led her band of warriors north when Enbarr fell, her hoping to find refuge in the Kingdom, finding not just safety with the Forgotten but eventually love in Miklan.

She wasn't the only one to be saved by Miklan, either; there were many people of Faerghus who could tell stories of him, whose stories all ended with “I would have died, but that Miklan and his soldiers were there.” Fleeing west, fleeing from traitorous nobles or Alliance warbands, many of Faerghus found that their pursuers were stopped by a single mercenary company, flying a black flag of skulls and spears. Miklan's Forgotten had held the line where high-born nobles fled and won victories where entire groups of knights failed, and their morbid banner became, entirely despite itself, a symbol of hope to a besieged people.

The man's heroics had inspired such reverence that Dimitri's father had rewarded him by granting him knighthood and nobility, restoring his lost status, and raising his mercenary company into a knightly order, the Order of the Forgotten, their flag made a coat-of-arms and formal heraldry. Sylvain's father had been enraged when Lambert ordered him to restore Miklan to his birthright, but according to Sylvain- who relished telling the tale- King Lambert had coldly told him that his choice was to either re-inherit Miklan, or be removed from House Gautier's rule himself and replaced by Miklan anyway.

House Gautier was on the frontline, was one of the easternmost Houses that still remained loyal to Faerghus, and he needed a trustworthy lord there- and no one had proven trustworthy like Miklan, who owning no territory at all had still defended Faerghus' land. King Lambert could not afford to have a disloyal man in charge of that House, and to place Miklan there was something his own spymaster was already encouraging him to do... as well as Dimitri, who knew of Miklan through Sylvain, and seconded the spymaster's recommendation, remembering how well Sylvain had spoken of his older brother.

Sylvain's father had no choice but to comply, renaming Miklan his heir. He had died to Alliance arrows, two years back, and bravely- he was not a coward nor disloyal, for all his other faults- and Miklan had inherited House Gautier from him, along with the title Warden of the Northeast. Sylvain had been saddened by his father's death, despite how complicated their relationship had been, but his brother's ascension to his rightful place and beyond was an unalloyed delight. They were never close like Glenn and Felix were in their youth, their father standing between them, but in their adulthood, without him, the two had grown thick as thieves.

( As for the words about him and Sylvain... after the war. That had been the oath they'd sworn, when they'd figured it out, when Felix had realized why he was so angry with Sylvain's philandering, when Sylvain figured out why he had never cared about any of the women he was with. After. This mattered too much to let themselves be distracted with anything else. Should they both live, they would find that Dagdan preacher, and Miklan would be Sylvain's best man.)

A letter for Ashe from Lord Lonato, notably opened more gently than the other letters had been, a single neat slice of a knife and not a swift ragged cut. The talk was simple, informing Ashe that Christophe and a group of knights and Duscur volunteers were going to support Miklan's attack alongside Gwendal, though Lonato admitted he did not know the details and had simply chosen to trust Christophe that it was necessary.

Much like Miklan's letter, after duty came family; Lonato told a few stories of how things had been going in Gaspard since, of Gaspard's farming trobules, of Ashe's siblings, of how big Christophe's children were getting, of the new blacksmith he'd hired, an Adrestian ex-patriot... all the little things in life that loomed so big, the things the war was, in the end, about _protecting_, from the Kingdom's point of view. Much like the Black Eagles and their fallen land of Adrestia, Faerghus had not started this war, and the Kingdom was fighting only so that, at day's end, there would _be_ a Kingdom of Faerghus for chidren to grow up _in_, a place where letters like this could be sent back and forth in peace, and not read by the spying eyes of a retainer before finding their proper place.

Reading these letters made Felix feel a bit conniving, but it mostly made him feel _resolved_; it was for people like Lord Lonato, and even people like Miklan, that he fought, in the hopes that they could someday go home to watch over growing crops and growing children and growing changes. It was what Felix hoped to do, to go home and watch over little Annette as she grew with Sylvain at his side, and rule House Fraldarius well enough that he did not shame his father and brother's memory.

That was one of the reasons he read the letters, alongside the simple need he had to know everything he could so his advice to Dimitri was sound- to remind himself of _why _the war needed to be fought. A letter like this could keep a man going where nothing else could.

But... Lord Lonato would not send many more letters like this. Lord Lonato's health was failing him, as it had been for two years now; age was finally toppling the old nobleman. Christophe's wife, a lady of a minor House, and their children, were with Lonato now, tending to him as he faded- a gentle lady, Felix remembered, having met her a few times when traveling. A good companion to have at one's deathbed.

Lonato had formally adopted Ashe and his siblings into his House five years ago, at the war's outset, declaring that the boy who had fought to save his prince was worthy of a title, be he common or not. Ashe had been delighted at the time, the papers a formality to his own feelings on the matter- and to Lonato's feelings too, the old man having always been prone to emotional decisions. The only reason he hadn't already adopted Ashe and his siblings was that he hadn't had a good enough excuse; but Ashe's heroics in saving Dimitri were more than enough. It would take a special kind of stupidity for a fellow noble to argue that Ashe did not deserve to be ennobled for saving the crown prince, especially considering that the crown prince- now king's- husband had been ennobled for literally the same thing.

It had benefit beyond the emotional release, though Lonato was doubtless not thinking of such things- he wasn't a very practical man, Felix had found. Ashe's formal adoption meant that, should the worst come to pass and Christophe be slain, House Gaspard would have a capable ruler, one who had the ear of the King, who could protect it as a regent until Christophe's eldest daughter came of age. Felix hoped it would not come to that, however; having lost his own brother, he knew how much it would hurt Ashe if something happened to Christophe.

Letters for Dimitri- Cornelia's letter, which was mostly businesslike, alongside a request for more information about the Black Eagles, but ended warmly and with an assurance that she believed in Dimitri, and knew that while what he was doing was risky, even if it failed, he had done the one thing he could. She sent news that his father was recovering, and that he loved him as well.

The second, third, and fourth were simple requests for supplies and allocations that Felix could deal with himself from minor nobles; even in the midst of a war for survival, some of the nobles were seeking to use this war as a means to increase their own personal security, and he would review the requests in private later before making his recommendations to Dimitri. They weren't important enough to examine further at this point.

The fifth and final letter for Dimitri was a heavily coded communique from one of their spies, disguised as a minor noble's request for vulneraries, which when translated reported that she had traced everything Lorenz did and... still couldn't figure out what it was he'd hidden, save that she thought he'd taken it to Enbarr. Felix hissed a breath out between clenched teeth. Goddess' death, how had _Lorenz_ somehow become the smartest opponent they had? Even Felix, who had only vague impressions of non-Lions, remembered him as an irritating little shit of a boy, all preening and pretension.

Yet none of his spies, even the best, had ever been able to figure out what it was he kept smuggling in and out of the Alliance. It was _infuriating_.

He sighed and moved on. The last letter was for both him and Ingrid, a dispatch from her father, talking of how well little Annette was doing, along with some information on how well House Galatea had been doing with House Fraldarius' support, a famine being averted by imported crops and better agricultural practices. Felix read it, then passed that letter to Ingrid behind him, who read over it with a small grin.

“ I wonder what Annette will think, when she hears I named my daughter after her,” Ingrid said, and Ashe chuckled.

“ Maybe she'll write a song,” Ashe said, “ and I bet you'll enjoy that one more than you did Dorothea's!”

Ingrid laughed and nodded agreement. “ Wonder what metaphors she'll use this time.”

“ Who knows... Annette's songs are layered things,” Felix replied. “ Remember the one about Manuela, disguised as a cleaning song?”

“ That one had been so _mean_, but so _accurate_,” Ingrid said, shaking her head. Her hair shook limply with it, what had once been a glorious blonde mane fit for any Lion now ragged patches of thin, listless yellow, great swathes of her head bald patterns of healed scabs. “ You wouldn't think she'd have it in her, she was always so sweet... but when she wrote her songs, there were hidden meanings _everywhere_.”

They all nodded, and Ingrid sighed.

“ I... I'm really glad she's alive. I hope she gets why I named my daughter after her- I thought she was dead...”

“ We all did,” Felix said, shrugging. “ The rumors of the Emperor- we thought that was all they were. We watched Edelgard storm out there- I can't believe Petra apparently pulled her out alive. Hell, I can't believe Petra was alive, not until we ran into her. Honestly, I chalked up the Black Eagles rumors to Adrestian optimism, not cold hard reality.”

“ Yeah, but that's not surprising coming from you,” Ashe opined, “ you're a cynic. It's a bigger deal when me and Ingrid both thought they were dead, we're the hopeless dreamers.”

They all laughed at that, as Felix drew out the account books and notes, and made ready for the morning's meeting.

-

Cichol dreamed.

A memory it was, though with that hazelike quality of sleep. The aftermath of one of the first battles of the war, Seiros in her true form breathing holy death upon these humans, who had defiled their Goddess in her sleep. He remembered the pride in his heart as he tore through the Agarthans, their surprise when he had snuck past them in human form and opened the gates, turned off their clever defenses, so that the dragons outside could ravage them.

He remembered Seiros' glowing praise of him, her sorrowful tone when extolling his virtues and noting that he had lost his ability to transform after his wife's death, her conviction when she said his wife would be avenged and he would regain his true, divine form.

He remembered how good it felt, to forget his wife, to forget how much he _hurt _inside, to pretend he did not remember- the ancient curse of dragons, that they remembered everything, that they could _never _forget- and submerge himself in the work of his axe, hacking, hacking, the lumber before him screaming human meat. It was the closest thing to truly forgetting that dragons could come, to be so involved in a task that they focused on it to the exclusion of all else.

He remembered going home to his weeping daughter, and how disgusted with himself he'd felt, that he was not there to take care of her. That he had let his own grief overwhelm his love of her, that he was failing her as a father.

He remembered how he'd thrown himself into the next fight with even more gusto, in his desperation to forget that disgust, just another horrible hole inside of him that he tried to paper over with abomination. How he had taken to dragging Cethleann along with him, on Seiros' great crusade, in the hope that his daughter would not hurt anymore, that she could find the same peace in slaughter he had, did not see how she saw with clear eyes what they were doing.

He remembered Nemesis, who came to them, Nemesis, who had murdered divinity, Nemesis, who came to them alone with Sothis' bones in his hands not as a sword but as an offering, he a sacrifice himself. Nemesis, who stood before Seiros and her council of three; Nemesis, who spoke of his regret and sorrow, and offered his very life in turn to Seiros, if it would end all this. He had begged Seiros to kill him and be done with it, to get her revenge and her justice cleanly and well, if she would but abandon her crusade against his kind, and not punish a species entire for the sins of one man. He had offered himself up to any cruelty she could imagine, to die to long tortures years from that day, alongside the last pieces of her mother that he had, if only she would turn aside from this terrible path.

He remembered Macuil snorting in contempt. He remembered Indech looking at Nemesis as though he had never really seen a human before, as if Nemesis was _worth _looking at, as if he was seeing something more in the barbarian's form.

He remembered the expression on Seiros' face, the way she considered it, just for a moment, the coin of choice flipping in the air inside her mind.

But Cichol was not the only one who buried his grief in massacres. If Seiros had taken him up on his offer, if she had taken Nemesis and the sword and agreed to turn aside from the great and awful crusade, she would have to finally face the fact that her mother was dead, that she would now live forever with that perfect memory of her in her heart, never to see her again, never to hear her again... and, further, realize that she had been wrong, that the horrors she had already perpetuated in this war were abominations against her mother.

She had made a choice, the same choice Cichol had always made, even unto the present.

He remembered Seiros' roar as she caught the coin and decided, her sadistic mockery, her promise to Nemesis as she attacked him with all her might that she would kill him and all his people besides, that it was no less than what they deserved; remembered Nemesis fleeing, running for his life and, impossibly, managing it, escaping despite all four of their own best efforts, for the Agarthans had chosen him wisely. Nemesis, who escaped his attempt at heroic sacrifice with Sothis' spine in hand, returning to the verdant flower that, in time, would blossom into Adrestia, to atone not with his death but with his life for the awful things he had done, seeking to save his people from his own sins.

He remembered much of that day... and he remembered that he spoke with his daughter of how Nemesis came to them, of how he had tried to end the war, and have them live in peace together again. He remembered what he had not seen, of his daughter thinking, of judging between Seiros and Nemesis, and thinking on that great moment when all this might have been averted... and given the choice between them, his daughter saw the truth Cichol had long since blinded himself to, the thing about his queen that he must admit in the depths of his heart- that if hero or villain exist in this tale, the names of Seiros and Cichol do not sit on the right side of it, on the side Sothis would have wanted.

He remembered when Cethleann had fled, when she had found, impossibly, the Goddess' own murderer a worthier king than the Goddess' very daughter, when she had chosen humanity over her own father, and the pit in his soul opened ever wider, ever wider.

He remembered Seiros' voice the only thing keeping him from falling in, as she mutated into the preacher she would become, her commands and her will a safety harness that kept him from going away inside and never coming back. He remembered seeing Cethleann's symbol flown alongside Nemesis' flag, he remembered fighting dragons he had known, who alternately swore to kill him or begged him to come home, remembered one in particular, a grim dragon who had sworn on the Goddess' grave that he would give him the wound that would kill him... who was killed by the Agarthans before that could happen, his tusks made into a weapon, later, a spear.

(A new memory intrudes- the girl, he is going to kill the Goddess-damned descendant of Nemesis, she is right there and his axe descends... but then there had been that single flash of glorious light, the shine glinting off the sharp edge of a spear, and then _pain_. The grim dragon's mighty tusk, though it had to cross all the centuries to do it, had finally fulfilled his ancient promise.)

He remembered how it was never enough. The grief _never _went away. He just piled atrocity on top of atrocity on top of that grief, so that he didn't have to face the truth; his wife was dead, and he would never have her back. Humans had slain her, he remembered how she'd looked, stretched out over the desert sands she had loved so well, his flying wife, who had looked on his ground-bound form and found in him something to love, so delightful and happy, all smiles and jokes, now just something the crows picked over.

He remembered an earlier time. Before the corpse of his wife, before the grief that ate him alive, before... before.

He remembered being happy. It was a distant memory now.

He was Earth and she was Sky and his daughter was the Sea, which was held between them; they had been so happy. Seiros had been happy for him, even, she one of his oldest friends, he one of hers, perhaps her _best _friend, one of the few who could say they had lived a length of time even _similar _to hers, he part of that second generation that had come after Seiros had been made, when the Goddess grew confident and made not one dragon, but a dozen, her own attempt to see where her limits lay. Indech and Macuil and... and he has not thought of Indech in decades, how had it come to this? Indech, who laughed. Indech, who taught Cethleann how to swim, who was delighted to be called Uncle, that human term Cethleann had learned and loved so much.

Indech, who had been his friend, had been part of that tight-knit group of him and Seiros and Macuil, but who had went west at Cichol's daughter's call, had found in the small child he had taught a lesson for himself, and turned his head from Seiros' light and towards the darkness of Nemesis.

But before then, he was just his friend, and Cethleann's beloved uncle.

He remembered Sothis' delight at his wife's pregnancy, little Cethleann the first-born of all dragonkind, the very first dragon not made by Sothis' cunning hands but by the simple interactions of love and lust, proof that Sothis had not made mere golems but a true-breeding race, that she was, in fact, a true Creator Goddess and not merely playing at divinity. He remembered Sothis' joy at each step of the process, how even the messy miracle of birth had set her to laughing with glee, even as she helped midwife it, made sure the birth was as painless and clean as possible.

He remembered pacing long trails in the dirt outside the lakeside lair his wife was laying the egg in, Seiros there to keep him out and keep him occupied, he nervous as all new fathers are, regardless of species.

He remembered her first cry. How different she was now, he'd seen her on the battlefield, his little girl, serving under a human banner, under the same human's banner, an Adrestian eagle...

Something touched him. He jerked awake. Searing pain on his hand, numbed only by a few vulneraries, flooded him; wait. Not searing pain _on _his hand, searing pain where his hand had once _been_; Goddess damn that princeling brat, Goddess damn him!

One of his men was speaking to him. He could barely hear him over the pain; the herbs were wearing off. He reached for his pack, fumbled with his off-hand to open a latch that his good hand could have snapped open without a thought, applying the pungent poultice inside to his wound.

A few minutes later, he recovered enough to ask what the soldier was saying, and to give commands. They needed to regroup. He'd worry about his hand later, about the way the veins looked... wrong. A clean cut, and his men had coated it in antiseptic, so why did he feel so sick?

No matter. Work to be done. Always work, to forget his grief... though somewhere in the back of his mind, a small voice whispered, asked him what he was doing, urged him to turn back. It sounded like Cethleann...

“ To the Bridge of Myrddin,” he said, as he snapped his helmet back on, and ignored that voice as best he could.

-

Lorenz slept the dreamless sleep of the exhausted, in his small, makeshift camp, far enough from the road that none would bother him. Some scattered remnants of his army wandered the road from time to time, and they all missed their resting commander, most of them heading towards Myrddin, where he would betray them again.

He had repeated the mantra before he finally fell asleep, the words that had kept all the Deer going all this time, from the tomb of an Emperor to Claude's lips to their hearts, the fuel for the terrible engine that was their great betrayal.

For the plan. For the scheme and the dream.

For a better future.

It didn't always help. He did not sleep well every night, and accepted the torment as his due allotment for his horrors.

But tonight, whatever forces in the world that are responsible for punishing people like him are busy, and the mantra keeps their feeble efforts at bay.

He slept peacefully, to arise refreshed, and make his way to Myrddin.

-

Byleth bolted awake again. She had dreamed again, but could remember none of it, none of it but a lament spoken in a voice she had not heard since Rhea trapped her in a dimension of burning light.

It ran through her head, a snake slithering around her thoughts, so much pain it was nearly physical.

_What damnation is this, that the man who murdered me tried to build my dream, and my daughter seeks to destroy it? What have I done, to deserve this punishment, that I must kill my daughter for the descendant of my murderer?_

_ What could possibly warrant this hell, that I am forced to see my daughter become this?_

In the thin morning light, Caspar poked his head into her tent, all smiles, smiles that dropped as he saw her face.

“ Hey, Professor, it's... I... have you been crying?”

Byleth looked at him, breathing hard, eyes puffy, nose running, saltwater trickling down her face.

“ No,” she said quietly, and spoke truth. “ Not me.”

-

Miklan woke up after a restless night- mostly because he was dreaming of his wife. He was a simple man, with simple wants, and he hadn't seen his wife in two weeks of careful travel; the only good news was that his rampant sexual frustration meant he'd probably pull apart the first thing to ambush him with his bare hands, at the moment he felt mad enough to headbutt a dragon to death.

Still, the work awaited. He got up, shook himself, and when Deadly Diane, his lieutenant, stuck her head in to wake him up, he was half-dressed already.

“ We moving, boss,” she said, then seeing he was awake, “ I'll tell the others.”

“ Alright,” he said. Diane was one of the thieves he'd picked up in his first go-round at gang-pressing criminals, and was one of the only ones still around, not taken either by Alliance arrows, draconic jaws, or simply deciding to quit while she was still ahead. She liked fighting too much to quit, and while she'd called herself Deadly to sound tough, the way all brigands tried too, she'd earned the epithet working for him, with her creepy little daggers and that oversized crossbow she'd made.

He scratched at his scar as he went, souvenir of a bandit who had weighed his options when Miklan presented him a chance at redemption and decided that the most proper course of action was to hack Miklan's face off. Miklan was not going to lie; he had enjoyed killing that asshole. Damn face still ached.

As he hobbled out, still half-asleep as he called lazily for his aides to help him get his armor on, he saw Christophe, who was not only up and fully suited in his armor, but had a small fire going with breakfast on it.

Miklan blinked at him.

“ What are you doing?” he asked dumbly. Christophe beamed his bright smile at him.

“ Cooking breakfast! Any special requests?”

Miklan shook his head in bleary confusion. “ Do you sleep?”

“ I merely wait,” Christophe said with a smile, and Miklan genuinely wondered for a minute if that was true. People like Christophe bugged the hell out of him; he was that kind of piece of shit perfect knight that Faerghus sometimes produced despite itself, the result of being raised by a good man to follow the example of, and choosing to live up to it.

Miklan, who had to figure out how to be a good man all on his own, no help from his father, envied him a little bit- envy being perhaps Miklan's chiefest emotion, even now- but he admired and liked Christophe too much to let it bother him much. It reminded him of the way his little brother talked of his friend Ingrid, who seemed the same kind of impossible, fairy tale knight, though Christophe didn't have the weird scars and tragic backstory going on.

Course, he also didn't have the magic bones, either, though Miklan had never been certain his brother wasn't fucking with him when it came to some of the stories he told of how all the king's healers and all the king's men had helped put knightly Ingrid back together again. What would the Duscur healers even be doing with metal shaped like human bones anyway and rune-encrusted thread, anyway?

“ Well, if you're making breakfast, I ain't gonna fight you on it,” Miklan said.

“ Same here,” a booming voice announced. “ Always did prefer camp fare to softer foods. Never did much like relish the idea of sitting on my ass in a castle getting fatter when I could be out fighting.”

That voice's owner strode out of his tent, Lord Gwendal, the most aggressive person Miklan had ever met- and he was no wilting flower himself. Gwendal was like a rolling boulder; he'd come to a stop someday, but Goddess' death, he'd do a hell of a lot of damage first. Corralling Gwendal into something manageable reminded Miklan of his early days as a mercenary, when he spent most of his time watching over his own troops.

“ Well, I'll get to cooking then,” Christophe said. “ Today, we reach the Valley!”

After a short breakfast, they broke camp, and the makeshift battalion- not nearly large enough to call it an army- moved, traveling rare and little-used paths, more like memories of roads than proper places to travel. They kept quiet, pegasus knights scouting ahead while the main unit of cavalry rode, and it gave Miklan a tremendous amount of time to think, almost all of his thoughts directed south, towards Sylvain.

He hoped his little brother was alright. Gronder Field... Goddess, what a fucking mess. Gronder Field, where the Kingdom had been born, where Dimitri would lose the whole thing if his great trick didn't work. Dimitri, whose father had been a fine king, whose father Miklan would owe all the days of his life for his kindness, for the piece of paper that had turned him from disinherited mercenary to prodigal son.

Dimitri had a big crown to fill; that was why Miklan was out here at all, to help him wear it. Goddess knew he wouldn't come to a hellhole like this without better than good cause.

But if the rumors were true...

He gnawed on that thought for a while, coming to no more conclusions than he already had. Travel stretched on and on as they marched through hills and forest and little steppe grasses, which eventually mutated into the burning lava and blistering, fiery crust of the Valley of Torment.

Soon after reaching the damned area's edges, word came from their pegasus knights, one fluttering down.

“ Sir,” she said, saluting him briefly from pegasus-back, “ we've got movement. It looks like the parties we're expecting.”

“ Good,” he said. “ Keep somebody in the rear to flee if we're attacked, and keep watch- we're liable to be ambushed, either by our supposed “friends” here, or the entire Alliance if they get wind of what we're doing.”

She nodded and took off again, and Miklan looked at his two fellow lords. “ This is it,” he said.

“ Let's hope it _is _an ambush,” Gwendal said, with genuine delight. The fact that he was this old and this battle-hungry spooked the hell out of Miklan. People who loved combat so much almost never made it past thirty; to be as old as this dude was, his prowess in battle must have been _terrifying_.

“ Let's hope they come in peace,” Christophe said, younger and wiser.

Down across from them, in that burning place, came a group much like them. In the lead was a woman with orange hair hanging in a small sidetail off her shoulder,, riding a roan stallion, a bow slung across her back. Behind her rode an older man, with a bow in his hand, too, and an irreverent grin on his face that told Miklan he was going to be... _interesting _to work with. They were escorted by cavalry, mostly heavy armor, though a few appeared to be... manaketes?

Great. There really _were _dragons among them. This was just amazing. Thank the Goddess he had the Lance of Ruin on him, might give one indigestion on the way down. They flew a flag that he was pretty sure had the Blade Breakers' symbol on it... but that couldn't be right, Jeralt died at Garreg Mach over five years ago...

In the middle of the group, protected by the heavy cavalry and manaketes both, there was a woman with long black hair and a stern look on her face, rapier at her side.

“ Lady Judith of House Daphnel,” Miklan called as he saw her. “ I do hope this isn't an ambush!”

“ I would already be releasing arrows at you if it was,” she announced. “ Lord Miklan of House Gautier. Have you come to parley?'

“ Yes,” he said. “ So what's all this talk of rebellion I hear?”

Judith smiled at him, the tight, simple smile of a practical woman.

“ You're not going to believe what I'm about to say, “ she said, and the bow-wielding man laughed and laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're going places, kiddos. Strap in; Act I is over.
> 
> Act II begins now.
> 
> Next stop:A battle at the Bridge of Myrddin that goes nowhere anyone involved wants it to go but from certain perspectives goes swimmingly, mistakes are made by those who can afford none, and the whereabouts of a very special hat are revealed.
> 
> Stay tuned.


	7. ACT II: Tales of Eagle and Deer

**ACT II**

**IN THE NAME OF THE GRIFFIN  
**

**TALES OF EAGLE AND DEER**

Set the stage; turn the page. 'Tis the day after Gronder Field; see now two of the Three Houses, as the next great Act begins.  
  


**DOROTHEA AND EDELGARD'S PARALOGUE**

**TO SPEAK OF LOVE AT LAST**

Dorothea Arnault, once a street rat, once an opera star, and from now until the day she died the general of the Black Eagles, woke up with the sudden sharpness that years on the street and on the run grant to all those who work. No muzziness for her... just asleep one moment, and snapping awake the next, her stream of consciousness coming like a cloudburst in her head.

She rose up, in her fine, pillowy bed. It was her one great comfort, her silly little indulgence; having slept on too many cobblestone streets as a child, her body ached for comfort, for softness in her sleeping arrangements. Stealing pillows for Dorothea had become something of a game among her friends, and Dorothea did not at all mind the results; her bed wasn't a bed so much as a series of blankets artfully arranged over a multitude of fluffiness.

The rest of her red tent was more practical. A small desk and a small, somewhat comfortable chair, both of which could be folded up and packed in a wagon; multiple cabinets, all of which held papers and notes and spellbooks, also easily shoved into a wagon. Some ink, some paper, two lanterns, and a single small, portable wardrobe, containing a small assortment of neatly folded, well-cleaned outfits, pairs of boots, makeup, perfume and her jewelry, most of which they'd managed to steal over the years; none of it were her original things, she'd fled Garreg Mach with just the clothes on her back.

Dorothea popped her head out of her tent briefly, checking outside- sun was rising, but wasn't up too far yet. Raphael was outside, already up and making her breakfast- and not a thin thing today, not with the absurdity of supplies they'd taken and were _still _taking from the Alliance caravan.

“ Morning, boss,” Raphael said, her unofficial, but still loyal, retainer. She hadn't realized just _why _Dimitri, Claude, and Edelgard had retainers, not until she was a leader herself. She'd always assumed it was just one of the arrogant perks of nobility, but being a leader has taught her otherwise; there was a practical purpose served. A true leader's concerns were so big that they quite simply needed someone _else _to handle the basic things of life, to free them to concern themselves with other matters; and while bad leaders would abuse that, good leaders needed the support. Retainers had tremendous value.

“ Good morning, Raph,” she said to him sweetly, and gave him a genuine smile. Raphael was her favorite, not just because he had served her loyally from the very day that Garreg Mach fell, but because, despite his occasional fits of melancholy, his practical viewpoint complimented her own.

He grinned back. “ Any messages need sending?”

“ Not yet,” she said. “ Tell me when breakfast's ready!”

“ Of course,” Raphael said, and Dorothea popped back into her tent.

Lot to do today... her mind went down the list. That was what Manuela had taught her, and it had stuck... she could hear her voice now. _Always check the list! _

Manuela's voice, at that time, was just a little slurred, her drinking habits not as bad then as they would become... but still present, in that little slur, so quiet you wouldn't even hear it if you weren't listening.

Manuela, who Dorothea can now admit was her mother, was the only mother she'd ever had, five years after her death at Garreg Mach. Manuela, whom she had tried so hard to save from herself, who all her efforts had guaranteed she would only live long enough to be killed by Claude.

After she got ready, she'd have that breakfast Raphael was making first. Thank the Goddess that Byleth had recruited him in the first place, even if it was for reasons that had nothing to do with the role he ended up serving. As Edelgard had once had Petra (and had her again, a thought that brought a bright bolt of joy into Dorothea's heart; Petra, very much _alive_ and back _home_), Dorothea had Raphael. She had no idea what she'd do without him.

Well, _now _she knew, she'd probably have roped Hubert or Ferdinand into the job; but that was now, after five years of experience with leadership in just about the hardest school of knocks imaginable. Back then... it might well have destroyed her, to have no one to rely on.

As it was, she'd had Raphael, Annette and Flayn all three, even in the worst days at the beginning, and then Caspar, Linhardt, and Bernie had stepped up... and in time, Ferdinand and Hubert had recovered as well.

Edelgard had been the exception, the lone Eagle who could not fly and had to be carried, but she'd still served her purpose well, the inhuman, supernaturally-powerful sledgehammer of a woman had at least been a weapon the Eagles could wield at their enemies.

( Hope spoke up in her heart. _After yesterday, maybe she..._)

She shook the thoughts from her head as she sat down in her small chair and popped open her hand mirror. Best not to worry over something that might just be a blip, a momentary recovery. If it worked... then wonders would never cease. And if it did not... then things were as they had been. Best not to make too big a fuss about it.

No, she had to focus on the work, and at the moment that meant looking good. Dressing up was _vitally _important; she knew now why officers throughout history had worn impressive clothes, why they put on a show. War was a lot like the stage; people needed to look at their leaders and _see _something there, believe in them.

A leader had power of their own, but leaders whose soldiers had faith in them had much greater strength; like a church in that sense, Dorothea mused as she quickly prettied herself with a few basic things of makeup from her wardrobe. She wondered if Archbishop Solon had ever had to dress up like this, and knew he had; there was a reason for his fancy clothes, for the air with which he presented himself. Showmanship can be a skill of terrible consequence.

So. Face on first, then breakfast, which the rebels ate alone; she only wanted them together for one meal a day, a compromise between the unity it inspired and the danger it represented in putting them all in one place. Then she'd need to see Felix, he'd mentioned something about Lorenz' command tent he wanted her to see... and it was strange, almost giddy, to have allies, for Adrestia to lean on Faerghus, for the Kingdom to lean on the Empire. As powerful as the Eagles had become, it was nice to have others to rely on... and her old schoolmates at that, it gave her hope that this war could be put behind them and _life _had again, the life she would have lived but that Claude had called storms and dragons both down on all Fodlan.

But after figuring out what was up with the tent, she'd have to sit down with Dimitri and formalize her idea, the thing her, Hubert, Ferdinand and Flayn had discussed on the long run down here to Gronder Field from Arianrhod, her great idea.

Maybe it wouldn't work, maybe it was a pipe dream... but there would _be _a tomorrow after this war, there would be a day after for Fodlan, and that meant there had to be a _plan_ for that day.

Dorothea would not lose the peace after winning the war.

No, she would do better than that. She would win the peace, too. First things first, of course: first the war. First, she would win it... and there would be pushback coming. This great victory was the prelude to the Alliance trying to swing back as hard as they could. That's how it went; every victory set you up for a counterpunch, and you were judged on how well you survived that retribution.

So deal with that first. And then, in time, Dorothea would take Claude's throat in her hands and strangle him- for all the dead, true, but for Manuela above all, her mother, who could not take care of herself and yet, somehow, had found the strength to take care of a little piece of gutter trash. Manuela, who had taken Dorothea under her wing, back when Dorothea had been no Black Eagle but just a defenseless chick; her mother, whom she had never called that, for fear Manuela would reject it and break her heart.

But despite those fears, Manuela had been the only mother she'd ever known, had taken her in and kept her safe in her nest even as her own star had been on the dim and her bad habits were starting to catch up with her, had protected her as fiercely as any mother ever had. Even in her fall, her mother had tried to protect her, keep her safe, until such time as her feathers had come in and she could fly on her own. She had taught her so much, kept her safe both from other opera workers and from noble patrons, had used up all her fame to make sure that Dorothea got a chance to grow up safe.

Dorothea might be the one person in the world to know the true Manuela; not just the drunk, dramatic disaster of a woman that was mocked in the newspapers, but the dedicated, intelligent, kind-hearted woman underneath all her faults and failures. Her mother had been a cracked diamond, still beautiful despite her flaws, and... and she mourned her, Dorothea missed her. For all her drinking and her problems, her mother had still kept it together enough to help her, to... to _love _her, if Dorothea was being honest.

She had never said it, but you could not call fussing over a child's wounds anything but love, you could not call defending a little one and providing it a home and feeding it anything but love.

Manuela had saved her life, had given her a home, had loved her, and it is a debt Dorothea can never repay...

But she can make a go of it by killing Claude.

For Manuela, she would kill Claude herself, when his powers were brought low and the armies of Leceister were crushed; for her mother, whom she never even got to bury, she would strip Claude down to nothingness, and then she would choke him to death, the slow way, with her own hands.

But that was just the first thing, all this war was just... a first step. When that was done, she would work to bring peace, even to the people of Leceister and Seiros' dragons, if they would but surrender.

Revenge had its limits, even when one was avenging one's mother, and Dorothea knew them.

First Claude, dead. Then second, the rebuilding of all Fodlan, and quite a task that will be; recovering Adrestian territory, figuring out who should rule the Leceister Alliance's former land, probably fighting at least one war with Almyra and maybe Dagda depending on how weak Fodlan seemed afterwards, restoring Brigid, finding a place for Cethleann and her newborn tribe... and what a life Dorothea had led, she took time to marvel for just a moment.

_I am seriously considering the question of where to place a new city for dragons, _she thought, and giggled for a second. As fundamentally strange as that question was, it was a genuine one: dragons had different needs than humans. Somewhere coastal and mountainous, Dorothea figured, dragons didn't view mountains as being nearly the obstacles humans did and that meant the land would be less valuable to humans, but they also needed access to the sea for those like Flayn.

But somewhere near the cities, too, they couldn't let dragons withdraw from the world again, or they were just asking for another Seiros to arise. Dragons would have to be part of human society down to its bones, part of this new world they would make... they needed a place of their own, for a people deserved that, but they would also have to be part of the lifeblood of the new world.

But then again, that was why she hoped her idea would work... a Federation... not one nation, but many, striving together...

These thoughts and more were interrupted by Raphael's excited voice outside her tent. “ Hey, boss, Edie's here to see you!”

“ If she's busy, I don't want to disturb her, Raphael,” came a soft, uncertain voice, and that quiet voice caused Dorothea's heart to seize up more than a thousand screamed battlecries.

That voice...

She had not heard that voice in five years. Those gentle, shy tones she had heard for so long at Garreg Mach, during those peaceful days, coming from a girl who would one day be an Emperor, which were lost with her eye during the school's last day. Edelgard had not spoken in that way in years; no, she had spoken, but her voice had been growls or Imperial commands or simple too-formal politeness, not anything so... tender. A voice can be a way of speaking, and she had not heard this one in half a decade...

“ Nonsense, I think... I think she'd be happy to see you,” the big man said, and Dorothea could have blessed him right there, he heard that different sound too.

“ I'm here, Edelgard,” Dorothea called out, her voice wavering, just the littlest bit.

“ Dorothea?” came that soft, uncertain voice again. “ I'm- I'm sorry, can I speak with you?”

That voice... not Edelgard, but _Edie, _after all this time...

“ You can come in,” Dorothea said, and Edelgard gently stepped inside, shyly averting her eye from Dorothea, as if afraid of catching her in a private moment and wanting to show respect. It was kind of funny, honestly; did she think Dorothea would have told her to come in if she was in no shape for visitors? With a smile, Dorothea waved her to her mass of pillows.

“ Sit,” she said, and Edelgard did so, the short Emperor plopping down on her makeshift bed/sofa/pillowy abomination. Dorothea's tent had few niceties, but the all-devouring tumor of softness in the corner _was _nice to sit on.

“ What do you want to talk about?” Dorothea asked, and Edelgard wasn't looking at her, seemed little and unsure. Edelgard, who Dorothea had heard Faerghus troops call with reverence the Phoenix after the great battle. Edelgard, whose Black Eagles had risen from the ashes of Adrestia to save them all. Edelgard, so powerful, so mighty, so fearless.

That very same woman simply sat there, looking down, hands clenched together, more terrified than she had been on the battlefield, desperately gathering her courage.

“ I... this is not the appropriate time, Dorothea, a-and if you have more important duties to attend to, I'll understand; but this has gone too long without me saying it. Now that I'm back to myself- as I hope to try and remain- I... I need to say it.”

Edelgard placed her right hand on her left arm, gripping herself tight, a posture Dorothea knew well- holding yourself tight, gathering strength as she turned her face away from Dorothea. The songstress recognized how much _pain _was there, as Edelgard made ready to say something that could not be taken back.

“ I'm in love with you,” Edelgard said, all in a rush, as though the words were poison she had to spit out. “ I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, you don't have to love me back, I know you can't, it's ok. It's just...”

She paused, took in a heavy breath, and kept going, softer, quieter... sounding _awed_. “ You shine, Dorothea, the way your magic does, you are beautiful lightning in human form. You are a light that I could follow forever; just you shining, going about your business, and I the world's happiest moth, just following the light and the warmth of you, never expecting anything more. You shine, Dorothea, your very presence makes my heart feel lighter.”

Dorothea had known, of course, but to hear her put it like this... not triumphant confession, but like a release of pressure, knowing it would be rejected but helpless to do anything but keep talking anyway.

“ I... it's okay, I know you don't feel the same way. A-and don't be afraid I'll do anything to retaliate- I would never- I understand! I don't want to pressure you- I would never hurt you for saying no. Never. Never. I understand, really I do! I... I wouldn't want to put up with me either. I'll make a terrible wife. I'm not me most of the time, and while I'm improving, I'll always have the ashes, Dorothea.”

Edelgard trembled, but did not cry, did not break. The words spilled from Edelgard's lips in a waterfall of self-hatred, and it broke Dorothea's heart, that Edelgard, sweet Edelgard, seemed so _certain _that she would say no, that she had prepared herself for this meeting in the _assumption _that Dorothea would reject her.

(Edelgard drew her courage back inside her again, rejected the easy route of the ashes, though this fire burned her more than most did. How in the world was combat so _easy _and these emotions so _hard_?)

“ I'll always... want to go back, to hide myself away again. It's like my eye. I will never see out of my left eye again, and I will never be entirely free of the ashes. I'm wounded, crippled... broken. I understand if you don't want... this. It's no problem.”

She forced her head up and looked Dorothea in her eye, and a queasy, weak smile was on her lips, her attempt to put on a brave face. Dorothea's heart ached to see it.

“ You will always be the great leader of the Black Eagles... everyone knows I'm not really in charge, but everyone _also_ knows that _you're_ our true leader. And you've lead us... impossibly well, Dorothea. You have held us together when no one else could. You've faced impossible odds, and you prove not to be their equal but their _superior. _I am fine with having nothing more than your friendship, I am honored to know you. I... I'll always support you, the way you've supported me. You don't have to love me back for me to protect you. It's ok, I knew you'd say no before I walked in. I just... I just had to say it.”

With all things said and done, Edelgard closed her eye and let out a long, shuddering breath of relief, and just sat there, as Dorothea considered all her words.

Dorothea had faced many suitors in her life. A few were decent sorts, who had come hoping for yes, but able to handle no, and they left her presence with her blessing. More common were the men who assumed that the opera singer would be _grateful_ she'd even gained a _moment_ of their time, who did not confess love but merely demanded she satisfy their lust, because they expected her to be too frightened or impressed by their status to say no. Men who, in her youth, were fought off by Manuela's fierceness, and then later by Dorothea's own talons, grown sharp and skilled by watching her mother swoop down on them.

But she had never, in all her long and flirtatious days, had someone be like this. She had never had someone like this, who seemed convinced that the only reason Dorothea would ever say yes was fear of retribution, who would say anything to assuage her fears that she would be forced into what the suitor clearly thought was a poor match for someone of her standing... who treated her like _she _was the one with all the power in the relationship, like _she _was the highborn lady, not simply the world's luckiest gutter trash.

Someone who seemed afraid that their very presence might pollute her, somehow, as if Dorothea were some pure and precious thing that could not afford to be associated with something so lowly, who knew with terrible certainty that her attentions would be found _revolting_.

The very Emperor of Adrestia, who should have sat on a royal throne with a crown of nations on her brow, had approached Dorothea like the former street rat was some impossibly important lady whose hand she was unworthy of, as if little Dorothea was so high above her that even the _idea_ of such a union might be offensive to her. Her, Dorothea, who somewhere on the inside, past the Black Eagle general and the Mittelfrank opera star and the thundering mage, still remembered being that little girl on the streets, no father, no mother, looked down upon, who got to be here today only on the kind heart of Manuela, who took her in.

Edelgard thought that Dorothea was so great that she, rightful Emperor of Adrestia, wasn't _good enough _for her.

Dorothea's face grew warm. A genuine blush. She marveled at that. She had learned to blush on command, not in the opera but long before it, on the streets, where presenting a sweet and innocent facade meant someone might give her just a little more money, where blushing as if they were new when hearing the same compliments over and over again- when hearing the _horrible _things that men said, from time to time- meant money enough for food, or charming a dangerous man just long enough to get away from him, or convince him to protect her from others less susceptible to her charms. Lying had been second nature to her, always had been- acting is just a lie, too, after all, a lie your audience chooses to believe.

She'd had to lie so often about her feelings that she had almost forgotten what it was like to _genuinely _feel something.

But this... warmth... was real. A real, honest blush, at Edelgard's regard, she felt innocent and new again, to blush like this, as she had not blushed in over a decade. This warm tingle, this honest _want _for another person... she had spent so long pretending that this real thing surprised her with its power.

She hadn't genuinely wanted anyone in years, not after Edelgard was lost at Garreg Mach; for all that Petra brought her body back, Edelgard had been _gone _for the last five years. The last time she'd felt such genuine desire had been at the Goddess' Tower, when Edelgard told that beautiful story... when she was still Edie, and not lady of ashes, echo of the good fire that had burned there once.

Dorothea had mourned her, the same as the others had... but she was a good actress, and so she had subsumed that mourning in her work, had focused on leading, because _someone _had to. Whatever tears she shed for Edelgard, alive but dead inside, she had done in private, and the only people who suspected were Hubert and Raphael; Hubert, because he simply noticed everything, even in his grief, and Raphael because the giant was her retainer and strangely wise, in his simple way.

But now... she was back, she was back, and she was so _brave_, she had confessed despite her fear and terror... her Edelgard, no, her _Edie_ was back...

Dorothea reached out a gentle hand, and put it to Edelgard's cheek. The Emperor's eye snapped open at that touch, she opened her mouth to speak, but Dorothea moved a finger before her lips; and that gentle pressure was enough to silence Edelgard. She had always done whatever Dorothea wanted, after all.

_And now I shall reward her for it_, Dorothea thought warmly.

“ Edie,” she said, “ I have safeguarded you for five years in the hope that the woman I knew at Garreg Mach would come back to me. I put no faith in nobles or titles. You know this. I did not safeguard you because you were my Emperor.”

“ I safeguarded you because I knew a woman, once, who sat outside a shut-in's room when her fears consumed her, so that she would have company, so that she would be in less pain. A woman who took food to that shut-in when she was too scared to leave her room to eat. A woman who, even as a girl, had saved the life of another. A woman who fed stray cats and gave them stupid names and loved them fiercely. A woman who wanted me, and had all the power in the world to make me hers, who with a single Imperial request could have demanded that my commoner body warm her bed... but who never pressed, never asked, enjoyed my attentions but never demanded them. A woman who would never even _think _to order my presence at her side, who treated me with the greatest deference and respect. Me, a street rat, a nobody. You've... you've always treated me like I was a high lady.”

Dorothea moved her hand, cupped Edelgard's chin, stroked her cheek fondly with her thumb.

“ A woman who became the friend and leader of all the strange students of her house, from a fighty little guy to his sleepy boyfriend, who was even good to Ferdie, back when I hated him for what turned out to be a mistake on my part. An Emperor, and a great, kind, _good _woman, and those things almost never go together, Edie; but they came together in _you_.”

Dorothea smiled at her, as Edelgard's eye opened wide, looking in this mirror Dorothea was holding up before her, seeing someone in herself that she had never seen before.

“ A warrior woman, too, strong and powerful and brave. A heroic woman, who even in the midst of her berserk rages saved the innocent- you were panicking when you saved Flayn, Edie, you were on a rampage, and still you saved her. You led us in those days, you and Byleth, you led us to glory in the Tomb, you led us in saving what was left of Remire, and you led us at the last, when we defended the artifacts and discovered the truth behind all Claude's poisons. And even more besides those great things; I still remember saving the people of Brigid from those pirates, I remember how you helped me when my sweet Ingrid was in danger. I... I remember how you never complained when I asked you to help me keep Manuela safe from herself.”

Dorothea swallowed. Manuela was an open wound, all these years later; but she pressed on. This conversation was not about the dead, but about the living woman before her.

“ I remember the Goddess Tower, the story you told; I remember singing to you. Edie, I don't do that for just anyone. Only you.”

Edelgard put her hand on Dorothea's, her eye a bright fire, warm and wet as she looked at Dorothea.

“ I have waited five years for you to come back. I know of your problems. I've read books, over the years, looking for ways to cure you; and they confirm what you say. It will last a lifetime. But... I am willing to help you shoulder that burden. I am willing to take you, all of you, the good and the bad, for all my days, Edie. I know you, and I love you.”

“ You mean it?” Edelgard asked, some part of her convinced this was a trick, that the thing she wanted would be pulled away from her at the last minute.

“ Yes,” Dorothea said. “ I love you, Edie.”

“ I love you,” Edelgard said, and sniffled. “ I... I never thought you'd say yes... sorry, I'm... I'm trying not to cry...”

“ You can cry,” Dorothea said, blinking away a few little happy tears of her own. “ I'm crying a little, it's a good moment for it.”

“ I've c-cried a lot already, recently, I'm half afraid I-I'm going to dry out,” Edelgard joked, stumbling, still trying to stifle her sobs, and that was so ridiculous that they both started laughing, Dorothea removing her hand to clutch her stomach.

It sounded a little like crying and it felt a lot like hurt. But that was alright. People cried when emotions were too big to keep inside, and happiness in such largesse was a rare visitor for both these rebels, so they enjoyed the moment.

When it was done, Dorothea cocked her head at Edelgard.

“ I'm going to kiss you, is that alright?” Dorothea asked, the way no one had ever asked her, and Edelgard blushed furiously, not a warrior woman of twenty-two but that schoolgirl of seventeen for a moment, awkward and shy. The heat inside Dorothea grew, seeing her like that, seeing this impossibly stoic and powerful woman so thrown off by something so small as a kiss.

Innocence had been taken from Dorothea by the streets, but, absurdly, impossibly, it seemed to have been returned to her in the form of Edelgard, despite the woman's violence. Blood-splattered Edelgard, furious Emperor Edelgard... who regarded the possibility of a mere _kiss _as something to blush over... It was... adorable.

Such a strange beast, Edelgard, Dorothea thought as she looked at her with fond eyes. Bloodshed to the _n_th degree, but this strange gentleness to the _n_th degree, too, not one thing or another but both... like fire, fire that warmed your body or burned it, capable of both at once. Edelgard's blush finally settled down and she could speak.

“ Yes, but... I've never kissed anyone,” Edelgard admitted. “ So I won't be very good at it.”

Dorothea chuckled. “ I prefer that, actually. You get somebody inexperienced, you can teach them how to do it right; you get somebody thinks they know what they're doing, well, you can't fix that kind of mistake, that's the worst kind of lover. Better to get them fresh. And I'm not just talking about kissing, either!”

“ Oh my,” Edelgard said, blushing scarlet, as Dorothea laughed again and brought her in for a kiss.

It was soft, and a little bit sloppy, Edelgard's eye screwed shut as she simply absorbed the experience of her first kiss. Dorothea let her have it. There would be time, later, to teach her how to kiss; but for now, Dorothea simply gave her a moment to enjoy the experience.

“ Thea,” Edelgard whispered as their lips finally parted, and she said her nickname like she was invoking the Goddess, sending a shiver down Dorothea's spine. She would... she would do a lot, to hear Edie say that again, in that way.

“ My schedule's clear for a bit,” Dorothea said. “ Want to just... be here, with me?”

“ More than anything,” Edelgard said softly.

They just sat together for a time, Dorothea gently kissing her, talking quietly with her, looking as Edelgard's eye regarded her with matchless wonder.

Raphael, outside, ate the first breakfast he made, and prepared two breakfasts, for when the two were ready to come out.

**HUBERT AND BYLETH'S PARALOGUE:**

**OH HOLY NIGHT**

Today was the best morning Hubert had woken up to in five years- because today was the first morning he'd had in a world where Petra was alive, and Edelgard was herself again. Hubert was a man of simple wants; he wanted the woman he loved to be alive, and for his Emperor to be whole, and the war had dashed all his simple dreams out of his hands...

But now, now the world was right again. Petra was here, and they would talk, and they would see if they fit together, if five years at war had changed them so much they could not fit; and even if it had, Hubert was a good man, he would be merely glad that one he had loved was safe, that his friend was alive. Edelgard was recovering. They had won the battle at Gronder, reinforced the bonds of the Eagle and the Lion, and they were stuffing their wagons full of stolen goods.

He even had a cup of coffee on the boil, and _fine _coffee it was, too, distant produce of Southern Almyra, where they said coffee originated from, discovered by a goat farmer whose animals had ingested the plant's beans and went wild on him. The caravan they were raiding had possessed them- probably some officer's private stash.

Hubert was grateful to that (probably dead) Alliance officer, and while didn't know if the goat story was true or not, he could believe it. He could _smell _the caffeine as the beans cooked. If goats had eaten these, they'd be so fired up they could have kicked a dragon to death. Even for Hubert, ancient aficionado of coffee, this was some _powerful _stuff.

He couldn't wait to drink it. They'd run out of good coffee almost a month ago; this first sip would taste like heaven.

Shame no one else agreed with him, save Flayn, who appreciated the caffeine. He remembered how he'd amused himself back at Garreg Mach by offering his bitter coffee and watching the Fodlese panic trying to know how to decline, but respectfully.

Not that they'd all quit on him. Lady Edelgard had taken him upon it, winning a bet with Dimitri by drinking three whole cups when the mighty prince of Faerghus could only drink two; they both got a stomachache, but she won the fifty gold they'd bet.

Later she'd admit to them she'd cheated. Her tongue had been numb since Brigid. The other Eagles had applauded her Deer-like cleverness in winning her contest with the chief Lion.

Her tongue had only awakened in her throat later, when she went away into the ashes, when whatever madness hit her at Garreg Mach's fall subsumed all her old hurts... a poor trade, to regain a sense of taste and lose one's mind, but nobody, least of all Edelgard, had a choice in the matter. Hubert wondered why that would happen, what could possibly make that so, and idly pondered what research could be done on the issue... but that would be for later, if the war was ever won.

Of those who were not cheating, only two besides Dimitri managed to drink an amount worth being memorable- Ferdinand and Annette. Ferdinand had managed to drink half a cup out of sheer determination, then told Hubert, in a tone of complete seriousness, with tears in his eyes, that it tasted like the ashes of dead children and the tears of the innocent.

Annette, so brave and so energetic, drank a cup once, swallowing a whole mug of the bitter stuff; an hour later, the fishing pond was the site of an impromptu ballet as Annette, skipping and singing on the pier, began inadvertantly casting, summoning tiny but powerful dust devils that swept through the pond and showered everyone around it with water and very confused fish.

Hubert was banned from offering her any more coffee by Byleth and Edelgard both, though Flayn, who came away with a basket of fresh fish, had approved.

Petra had laughed until she cried at the gentle chaos Annette spread. That memory had once brought him amusement, then pain when Petra was gone; but now it could be funny again, Petra was _alive_, and had the world ever been better?

_ My love is alive_, Hubert thought, and offered a gentle and silent prayer of thanks to the Goddess-in-Byleth.

( Byleth, approaching his location with questions in her mind, felt that prayer, that genuine _gratitude_, something dark and cool and sweet, like a sip of chilled water on a hot day. She felt it slip into the thing inside herself that was a Goddess and a horrified mother and something like her closest kin all three, the parasite/symbiote/sister she carried inside, who fell on it famished and hungry.)

The camp was at peace this early in the morning, various soldiers staggering awake and making breakfast, tending wounds, fixing equipment, the little details of any army after a battle. That didn't change, even among the scattered souls of this camp of strange travelers and heroes and freaks, the most motley army the world had ever seen. Dagdan voices spoke the words of Adrestia to lilting voices from Sreng, former Allied bandits healed wounded soldiers of Duscur, Morfian foods were prepared on Faerghi skillets by manakete hands. Hubert had always marveled at the living patchwork the Eagles attracted, that the famed fable of their name brought from distant shores.

Hubert was even more experienced with that than anyone. Hubert's tent was located in the middle of his small group of dark mages, the most potent artillery they had, even fiercer than Flayn's dragons; but the talent for the elder magic was so rare and so precious that his group was even more rag-tag than the rest of the Eagles. In this most absurd and offbeat of armies, the dark mages were the single strangest group.

Case in point were his current neighbors. To the left of Hubert's tent was a man from Morfis who had once been a sailor, whose skin was half tattoos and whose speech was half foreign words Hubert had learned to translate over three years of commanding the man (they were all curses); to Hubert's right was a tent containing three women from the Alliance, who had come to serve initially out of horror at what they'd seen their own people do, and had eventually started a relationship with each other, coming together over shared disgust with their former homeland and a likewise shared obsession with food.

Before him was a fellow Adrestian's tent, her a nobleman's daughter who had run off with her lover, a good man who had died saving her life from her father's assassins; a mistake the father had made, because now his daughter was the most ferocious of Hubert's dark mages, did not cast her spells so much as scream them into being, each word leaving her mouth with all the force of her icy rage. Behind his tent was a Sreng barbarian who had left his homeland seeking to learn peaceful ways, a man from a land torn by constant warfare who was the most considerate, polite, and serene man Hubert had ever met, a scarred and ugly avatar of humility and peace.

None had known they were dark mages, not until they had joined the Eagles and Hubert had tested them for it. In each he had found that the oldest spells resonated with their souls; Hubert had taught them, in the same careful way his father had taught him, and it was to his credit that he had not yet lost a single pupil under his tutelage. The elder magic was dangerous magic, it had secrets and dangers that no other magic did... but his wise father had taught him to resist them, and he was able to pass that benevolence onward. His dark mages died in the war, but they did not succumb to the very shadow they were using.

( He hoped to tell his father in person that he had upheld the traditions of the Vestra family, even in extremity. He hoped to tell his father in person again that he loved him. Until Petra, he had not dared hope... but now, he hoped only that his father could last until they retook Enbarr, and Lady Edelgard reclaimed her throne.)

Hubert looked over the tents of his fellow shadows fondly as his coffee heated up, smelled the gentle smells of smoke and food, listened to the murmurings of early morning welcomes and hellos, the soft noises of lovers awaking in each other's arms amidst the semi-organized chaos of the tents, the soft scrapes of spoons in bowls and stones sharpening weapons and the sussuration of fastening leather... and realized that he felt... good.

He felt, for the first time in far too long, truly at peace.

He turned his attention back to his coffee, stirring it, watching and waiting for just the right moment, enjoying the contented feeling he had not felt in years.

It wouldn't last, of course. The Alliance would seek to press a greater army against them; this was the dangerous part of war. This was where advantage was a thing of moments and indecision; ther'ed be a pushback. The victory here today would cause the Alliance to push back as hard as it could. There'd be bad times ahead.

But right now, he was content with his coffee.

A few minutes later, right as he was getting his mug ready- an old metal thing he'd recovered from Garreg Mach, replacing an older cup that his preferred beverage had eaten the bottom out of- Byleth barged into the circle of his little fire, passing the numerous tents nearby with all the speedy gracelessness of the socially awkward.

“ Hubert,” she said, with her usual lack of emotion. “ I need to talk with you.”

Hubert glanced up at her, for a moment dumbfounded by the suddenness of her appearance, finally recovering.

“ Of course, Professor,” he said. Then, in a fit of impish mischief, he pointed at the kettle before him. “ Coffee?”

“ I... no, never, that hasn't changed at all,” Byleth said, and Hubert gave her a sardonic smile, as she grinned weakly back, both remembering Garreg Mach.

“ Suit yourself. What can I do for you?”

“ I... I'm sorry, this is a bad time, isn't it?” Byleth suddenly realized. “ Too early in the morning. I should have waited... sorry. It's not that urgent. I'm... still bad at social things... sorry.”

“ it's just the way you are,” Hubert said with a shrug. A year of socialiation at Garreg Mach and emotions awakening had not really rubbed the rough edges off of Byleth, but he honestly found his Professor's brusqueness and blithe obliviousness rather charming. “ I'm used to it. What's the trouble?”

“ I... I've been having a lot of weird dreams,” Byleth said. “ I... I know I'm not human, Hubert... and I want to know what I am. I want to understand the dark magic that made me.”

Hubert nodded. “ I've been waiting for you to ask about that. We have none of Solon's notes on your creation, no real information at all, save for your father's journal, and we've been quite busy these last five years... but I _did_ have my spies collect anything they found out about homunculi. A side project- I... was wondering if there was a way to revive you, perhaps.”

Byleth smiled at him for that again, that small rise in the farther corners of her mouth. “ Thank you,” she said. “ What did you manage to find out?”

Hubert sighed as he poured his readied coffee into his mug. “ It's not really much; homunculi are vanishingly rare in history, and it's hard to tell what are genuine reports of your people and what are actually reports of golems or even ghosts. The formal term “homunculus” was only agreed upon within the last century, though people like you have existed at several points in history.”

Byleth's thin smile grew into what would be, for other people, a very small smile, and all at the words 'your people', at the sense of _belonging_ they gave the lonely woman, small as it was.

Hubert recognized it for the beaming smile it would have been on anyone else, and he smiled back; it was impossible not to, seeing his Professor so happy. He did not know _why _she liked that, but... well, perhaps he did. Dark mages were solitary sorts, too, and maybe the Professor thought of herself as a freak...

_At least she's with the Eagles_, he thought with amusement. _We're a motley crew._

“ What do they say?' she asked.

“ They say that you are capable of... well, anything a human can do,” he said. “ Though some other, mostly vague, powers are ascribed to your people. Homunculi appear as both heroes and villains in some stories, though they are much more likely to be the latter, I am sorry to report. The humans recording these tales had a bias, which I apologize for.”

Byleth shrugged, recognizing and approving of Hubert's gentle and polite way of describing what he'd found. Hubert wasn't usually like that, the tall man blunt and to the point, and she appreciated the kindness.

“ I figured,” she said. “ We are made of darkness, after all.”

“ Darkness is not evil,” Hubert said, the endless refrain of every dark mage on the planet, even the actually evil. After all, being an asshole wasn't due to the _magic_, and even right bastards liked to be appreciated for their own talents. “ Humans are just diurnal creatures, and so are prejudiced towards the sun and against the night. Were we a species awake mostly at night, a similar conversation would be had between someone like yourself and a light mage, I imagine. Dark magic has no morality, any more than a sword or a spear does; it simply is.”

“ So why do so few practice it?” Byleth asked.

“ Partly it is simply that we _are _diurnal as a species,” Hubert said, slipping naturally into a teaching role. Teaching of dark magic was one of the few joys he'd had, in the long years of Petra's death. “ Few human souls resonate with the elder magic. Magic is partly an effect of personality, for humans. Theoretically, a human can learn any spell, but in practice, it is simply easier to call forth the magic that already suits one. Flighty and energetic personalities can call upon wind, hot tempers and deep rage call forth fire- the most likely reason Lady Edelgard can summon it- personalities of strong faith and determination can heal.”

“ There are exceptions, of course, times where a person's magic does not match their nature, but there's usually an explanation in there somewhere- heavy early exposure to that kind of magic, living in an area saturated with one kind or another, etc. For the oldest magic, a personality of mysticism, of secrets, of... well, not to put too fine a pun on it, shadiness, is required, coupled with an extremely strong will and great courage. The right personality for dark magic is rare, unfortunately. More common are those who were exposed to it at some point early in life.”

“ But that's for humans,” Byleth murmured. “ What about for homunculi?”

“ I'm not sure, but I have a theory,” Hubert said. “ From conversations with Flayn, I have learned that magic works differently for Nabataeans. Their magical affinities are determined by their elemental associations- Flayn is a powerful healer, and a quick study as a mage, but only icy magic suits her when it comes to hurling spells- though she did manage a wind spell once, said something about her mother being a Sky dragon.”

“ And if I'm made of darkness-” Byleth began, and Hubert nodded. The Professor had always been a fast study.

“ I suspect exactly that,” he said. “ Humans are a creation of chaos, as the Church teaches; we were here when the Goddess descended, born of the randomness of long evolution, and so we have influences from all magical sources. You, on the other hand, are _shaped _like a human, but you were _made _out of night. I very much doubt you could do normal elemental magic even if you tried; you just don't have the connection. Even the fact that you are capable of light magic is explained by your other passenger; Sothis' nature was pure light, as far as anyone can tell. It's not 'you' casting those spells at all, most likely, but parasitically drawing it from her.”

“ Parasitically?”” Byleth said, as somewhere deep inside her, something _hurt _at that word, shame and guilt hot as the sun. Her smile faded.

Hubert internally frowned. He was not one to mince words, but he also hadn't realized he was stepping on a sore point.

“ Apologies, I misspoke in my haste. From what little I understand of what Jeralt wrote down, you and Sothis were both drawing something from each other; she got a physical connection to the world in you, you drew life functions from her, and you both partook of your mutual prowess and powers. I should have said symbiotic instead of parasitic; parasites are one-sided things, thieves, but symbiosis is when two organisms work together as one. The latter definition is closer to what you and Sothis were.”

That shame and guilt lessened, though they did not leave, like a clenched fist in her soul, but Byleth nodded to Hubert. She'd take it.

“ I'd... I'd like to learn dark magic,” she said. “ It might help me deal with these dreams.”

Hubert nodded. “ Dreams _are _related to the dark, though they stand as their own sort of strangeness. Still, adding another tool to our arsenal is never a bad thing, and I suspect you would be a prodigy at the elder magic; it is inherent to your very creation, part of the very building blocks of your soul. Come into my tent, we have a simple test we can perform that'll awaken it, if you've any latent talent at all.”

They headed inside, Hubert downing as much of his coffee- which was just as good as he'd figured- as he could in one go before gently placing the cup of bitter ambrosia on his desk. Hubert's room, though he did not know it, was a mirror of Dorothea's, save that his tent's fabric was black and he did not have the galumphing pillow-beast in one corner, rather using just a small blanket and bedroll. Hubert was not a man who needed many comforts.

He reached into one of his cabinets, and withdrew a vial of magically-reactive ink.

“ Hold out your left hand,” he said. “ It doesn't have to be your left hand, but the Church holds that Sothis once said 'darkness is the left hand of light', and so there is a bit of a tradition.”

Byleth held out her left hand. Hubert held up the vial of ink and muttered words that had been old when Sothis was born, words that reflected the language black holes spoke, words midnight had whispered to itself in the time before there were stars; a soft and whispering language, the sleepy murmurings of a world that was not yet born.

In Adrestian, Hubert said, “ Darkness, the last thing, and the thing that lasts; night eternal, be inside thee or not, and be revealed if there.”

He carefully dripped a single drop directly into Byleth's palm.

And then... there it was. No fancy thing this, no blast of power or roar of triumph; this was the silent night, not the blazing light or primal chaos or formal order. Just the night, a quiet thing, the ink drop in her hand turning itself into a ball of purest black, and as Byleth gazed into it, she saw the slow turning dance of the stars, and she _understood_.

In that small drop of holy and silent night, she saw herself from outside herself, saw the shadow she was; not some slithering thing, not some crawling abomination, as she had feared, but something natural, something _right_. She was as natural to the universe as the humans about her, as the Nabatea, for all her fears. Did not everything that lived cast a shadow? And was your shadow not your closest companion, all your life? She had suffered the touch of burning light and the horrors of Rhea's magic; she of all people had no excuse to confuse light for good, and to hold the opposite view. All things had a place, and this was meant to be.

_She_ was meant to be. Be her creation artificial, still Solon had made her out of a natural thing, and it accepted her as kin. Darkness, that people could rest from day's labors; the cover of night, that the small could hide from the big, that the weak might flee the strong and have hope of escape in the shadows. The nothing that was, so that everything _else _could be, the canvas on which all wonders were painted...

She gazed around herself, at the universe entire, saw that the outer dark went on forever, galaxies and nebulae and suns and planets, and knew this: she belonged here, no less than the trees and the stars.

It did not assuage all her fears- she was still a lonely thing, at day's end, the only homunculus in all the world- but this, at least, she knew, as she looked at that little ball of blessed ink, and her eyes saw the universe entire; she belonged here. Last of her people and loneliest, still was Fodlan her place in the universe.

The only homunculus... but she felt... there were other things that were _like_ her, if not the same, other children of the night. Right next to her, Hubert and all his dark mages, who did not have this in their bones but knew it as a friend. Farther afield, another was nearby, her mind seeing the image of a blue lion, murdered by a million weapons, resurrected from death by wise foreign hands, who was not alive at all but undead, dead once but no longer, whose ghost had possessed her corpse so that she could fulfill her wish of being a perfect knight. By a lakeshore far from her, she saw six others, who wore human skins and were not human, manaketes whose true forms were the great snakelike forms of shadow dragons, and they were making ready for war, they were preparing for battle...

And somewhere far to the east of that lake... something in the north, on the border between Fodlan and Almyria as he always was, a man whose name she knew, not a homunculus but something of him was becoming _like _her, deeper shadows...

(_Claude?_)

But the moment passed, and she withdrew inside herself, and was back in Hubert's tent, her revelations momentarily forgotten in the shock of transition.

“ Few can call on the elder magic,” Hubert said, as he saw her blink, pupils huge, understanding spreading like a benevolent plague across her face. It was a moment he cherished, a fundamental moment in any dark mage's life, the wisdom that flowed from touching the very shadow of existence. “ Congratulations, Byleth, you join the few, the proud, and the strange.”

She blinked again, still staring at the orb of ink, floating gently in her hand like a soap bubble. Hubert tapped her shoulder.

“ Don't look into it too far, not yet. That can be fatal. The problem is one of dissipation; darkness is too big for most to handle. Darkness is everywhere, and it takes a certain focus to resist the urge to just... go into it, to get lost exploring it. People get rendered empty, not because the darkness takes them, but because they get lost while exploring its endless possibility... Not a few ghosts are born from that.”

Hearing that, Byleth closed her hand, shut the night in her palm down. The ink, losing cohesion, splattered into her hand as a sticky mess, though before Byleth could even begin to look for a handkerchief, Hubert was cleaning her hand with one he'd already prepared.

“ Everybody does that,” Hubert said. “ Except the Sreng guy, anyway. I learned to be ready.”

Byleth, who had no idea what he was talking about, just shook her head, watching him clean her hand of the ink that had... shown her so much.

“ I... realize why people might get lost. It was... beautiful.”

Hubert smiled at her. “ It is. It also does not help that it is connected to the dead. While I can't claim to speak for the Nabatea, or for your people for that matter, I know that for humans, at least, our souls cycle within the human race; when we die, pieces of us go to those we loved the most, to strengthen their spirits. Some dark mages can tap into that... but it's rare, hard, and it's even easier to get lost in the darkness chasing the ghosts of your loved ones. Necromancy is a dangerous divination.”

Her loved ones... chasing ghosts...

(that quiet sobbing in the back of her skull)

Byleth's eyes widened, not by a little bit, but by a _lot_.

Hubert saw that look on Byleth's face, and he remembered that the events of five years ago were not so long ago, for the woman before him, that she had not aged in the meantime, either physically or mentally.

For him, the chaos and sorrow of Jeralt's death was a thing that had happened half a decade ago, and while Hubert had grieved, he had only known that good man for a short while and from a distance; for Byleth, who was the man's only daughter, those events had happened only a few short months ago, and he could not imagine the sharpness of that pain.

A bolt of pity shot through him. He hadn't thought of that...

“ Don't,” he said gently. “ I tell you this only because you should know the full extent of your powers; if you chase your father now, you will be lost, Byleth. You are not trained enough, you do not know enough. In time, you will be able to do so, but not now.”

“ Not him,” Byleth said, surprising him. “ I... I do want to see my father again... but there's... there's something else inside me. What of Sothis?”

Oh.

_Oh_.

“ I think,” Hubert said with a very small voice, as the scale of what Byleth was talking about hit him, as he realized how much that _might _matter, “ that perhaps we should train you as fast as we can.”

_ Oh, Goddess..._ he thought. In fact, that was a very appropriate thought. _Oh, Goddess... what might we do, if we could contact you again?_

(Somewhere inside Byleth, Sothis, who did not want to be found, curled up around herself tighter, and wept.)

**THE FIRE DRAGON'S PARALOGUE:**

**THE HONORABLE LEVIATHAN'S CONVERT**

She'd come back in the morning to check up on his brother, and it meant he did not know what to do.

The fire dragon did not know why she cared. She had come and she had brought breakfast, leftovers from the meal they'd had yesterday, more of that fine hot chili that burned his tongue and soothed something inside him. He'd been dreading their prisoner's meals; he was used to variety in his palate, the great benefit of human form, and the idea of subsisting on bland food disgusted him.

But his fears had proven unfounded. The food they'd served was no gruel, but some kind of warm, delicious beef chili, flavored with blazing peppers of Adrestian extraction. Heavy and hot and filling, and perfect for a fiery Nabatean... but he could not help but wonder _why_.

By the time the healer had brought them dinner, his brother's eyes had fluttered open, and he'd been able to sit up and eat. Still, he'd made sure to take the first few bites of both their bowls, to make sure there was no poison in them.

He couldn't imagine there would be, not after all the effort they'd put into healing them, but he was paranoid. His little brother was counting him, and he'd _always_ been protective of his little brother, ever since his egg shell hatched too soon and the priest had dismissed him as a runt.

Runt, yes... but _brother_ too, yes.

When he'd suffered no pain or dizziness after eating, he'd refilled his brother's bowl from his own and they both ate. His brother had eaten slowly, but he _was _eating. The healer had said that he would be slowed for a while until his natural fire rekindled, but he would live, and then they were left alone all that long night, his brother curled up at his side, they'd been given some blankets to sleep under, nice and toasty, the way they liked it.

Then this morning... more food. More of that good chili. He ate from both bowls again, but it did not take him as long to decide they were safe; no point in killing them now, he figured.

But he still didn't know why the healer was doing this. The healer, who was not a healer, he knew now, but the leader of this group of rebel drakes; he saw it in the way the others deferred to her, the way they sought to catch her eye, or looked at her with gratitude and respect. It reminded him of the way he'd been taught to think of priests, those elder dragons who were most directly Seiros' holy servants, but without the undercurrent of fear that permeated all interaction with those ancient souls.

Why was someone like that serving breakfast to prisoners? What... what _was _this?

She'd left a little while ago, that strange healer, that rebel leader, heading to some conference or another with her human allies, moving out at a human messenger's request. A messenger who had stayed behind for a moment, and was now chatting amiably with one of the Nabatea about all the supplies they'd managed to steal; a conversation about... about a lot of things that the fire dragon did not understand. He felt foolish, he felt uneducated, he felt... he felt, oddly enough, _used_.

Why was he not taught these things? Why was this not... all these words... his military training had consisted of nothing much, compared to what he'd seen from his enemies. He hadn't even known any dragons opposed Seiros, though admittedly he had not been the best of students. Perhaps they'd covered it and he'd missed it.

Still, between him and these members of the enemy, he felt a gap, wide as the ocean... Appropriate, perhaps. He had felt the leviathan weight of the healer's true form, knew what it meant.

He chewed two things at once- with his mouth, his meal, with his mind... all this. The camp, the people about him, Nabatea and... what did she call them? Firstborn of the World. Such a strange idea, to have a term of _respect _for those he had been taught to dismiss, a word that was not spit or slur but an honor. Firstborn of the World and Children of the Goddess, all around him, moving as one...

Things that would never happen in Almyra took place each second about him. He watched dragons and humans talking around him, and saw no fear in anyone's eyes. He witnessed manaketes working all around him, doing work he'd only seen humans doing before... but he also saw humans doing that work too, helping them. They gave this help not out of fear or servitude, but due to allegiance, the hands of both races turned to the same tasks.

He saw a flag flying from a great pole above the combined camp, colored the sea-green of manakete hair, with a shining white star in its center, descending, the way that a Goddess had, once upon a time, descended onto this world, and from her blood birthed a new people. A flag that flew proudly beside other flags, flags of human nations, blue and red flags that were not beneath or above the sea-green, but fluttered beside it in the wind, equal in dignity and respect.

A dream, perhaps. Something hard to make real... but a goal to strive for, a thing you might, if you worked at it, truly make someday, the kind of thing that _should _exist, if it did not.

He thought of the healer, and her words and actions. He thought of her healing an enemy, his very own brother- this enemy leader, who would bend her knee to make sure his runt brother lived. He thought of a leader who would bring food to prisoners. He thought of lies and manipulation, and how hard it would be to _fake _all this unity, if there were not some sort of truth to it.

He wondered about many things for a long, long time, even days later, as he watched human and Nabatean hands erect a fourth flag, flying higher than the other three- a black flag, on which a white griffin stood proud beneath a sea-green star.

( He would serve under that flag, in time, as would his brother, learning the healing arts from the woman who had saved his brother's life and both their souls.)

**HILDA AND LYSITHEA PARALOGUE:**

**TWO DOES AND THREE DREAMS IN ENBARR**

Goddess, Adrestia was so fucking _hot _in the summer.

Thankfully, it wasn't so bad in the shade. Hilda leaned back into her comfy lounge chair, and sipped her chilled wine. Her and Lysithea were waiting out an almost improbably hot afternoon, the sun doing its level best to kill everyone in the Adrestian capitol. Hilda, used to the colder conditions of the Throat, didn't much like it, and for Lysithea it was actually openly painful, the storm dragon that made up half of her skin a thing of shadows and rain and coolness that could not handle so much sunlight.

But, thankfully, the house Hilda had nabbed for them had a pool. Hilda lounged next to it with a series of pretty parasols for shade, wearing a lovely one-piece bathing suit designed to fit cutely against her muscled and curvy form, while Lysithea let her vast form wallow in the shaded, cool waters, her long neck and twin faces out of the water and laying on a series of comfy, fluffy towels laid out beside Hilda.

A table next to Hilda carried a variety of drinks with magically-created ice floating in them, all once owned by this house's former master, who had the same tastes Hilda did in wine- sweet, almost sugary, like lemonade with bite. On the far side of the pool was a table with a long tray of crisp, cooked pork, for Lysithea to enjoy when the urge to eat hit her.

Hilda idly brushed Lysithea's hair gently with the fingers of her left hand as she sipped her wine and enjoyed her lazy afternoon, the two having dismissed all their servants for the time being... though Lysithea had still put a spell of silence up around them for privacy.

Hilda once again congratulated herself on taking this house. Hilda had commandeered it from one of Enbarr's richest traitors, a disgruntled nobleman who had sold the city out for a fortune when the Alliance arrived. He was one of Caspar's relatives, funny enough, who had disagreed with the rest of his family about the need to sell out to the Alliance. Vile little bastard.

Hilda had killed him and stolen his house her first day in town, claiming she'd been sent by Claude to clear out traitors and his name was on the list. A good memory; his shocked disbelief as the axe came down had been a delight to her.

She sighed happily, and reached up, adjusting Dorothea's hat atop her head. Her finest prize, stolen two long years ago, in the same battle in which she'd nearly killed Edelgard; her proudest moment, that the laziest scion of a house of monsters could go toe-to-toe with Nemesis' holy descendant and not just contest the battle, but _win_. Hilda might be the one person that Edelgard, one-woman army, had ever lost a duel with, and that victory was a sweetness to a martial heart.

Though, at the time, her victory had left her... worried. Claude had been convinced that Edelgard was not the one to lead Fodlan to a new dawn, but Hilda had always bet her money on the Black Eagles as a whole.

Despite that, Hilda had wholeheartedly agreed with Claude's plan to go after the Eagles relentlessly, because Hilda was _also d_etermined to make them _prove _it. When Edelgard had lost that fight, Hilda had worried... but the Eagles saved her, and Hilda's efforts to hunt them down afterward came to less than naught. Hilda had threatened a hundred villagers, burned a dozen villages, murdered the innocent and tortured captives... and all it had done was lead her straight into an ambush that nearly took her head off, in which the Eagles killed half her forces and sent the rest into screaming retreat.

She'd been _thrilled_. She'd been right after all; the Eagles, and not the Lions, could lead Fodlan to a better world. Dimitri had barely held Faerghus even with all the help the Deer were secretly giving him; but the Eagles, under Dorothea's wise command, with the Deer gunning for them with everything they had, had outfought, outfoxed, and outflanked them and come out ahead. They had built an army of all the world- they even had dragons!- and with it, they would overrun the Alliance, kill Rhea's dragon loyalists, and save the world.

( They would also kill all the Deer, but Hilda had come to terms with that a long time ago.)

It wasn't Edelgard, precisely, though Hilda hoped the Emperor would come back to herself; it was the Eagles as a whole, these children of Adrestia who had grown up into legendary rebels. And it... well, it _fit. _Irony and contradiction were the only friends the Deer had ever had, they ran in the veins of the Golden Herd, and it was irony and contradiction for the oldest nation in Fodlan, Nemesis' ancient empire, to give birth to a new age. It had... fit.

Hilda was not a religious woman, but she _did _believe in patterns.

Still, it would only work if the Deer could play their part. She hoped things had went _right _at Gronder, and again at Myrddin, right in the sense of going wrong in _just _the right ways. The plan was so fragile, the scheme was so... _breakable. _They were giving their lives and their honor for this, but even that sacrifice might not be enough; on slim chance did the dream rest, particularly here, at the end, where so very much could go wrong. The poison might not work at Myrddin. Lorenz might not escape the bridge in time; they thought he could, but mechanisms could get rusty, or fail, or... or anything.

Lorenz had to live, because Derdriu was going to be hell to capture without inside help. Claude had to be at the Throat, he couldn't command the defenses at Derdriu and leave the Aquatic Capital defenseless. He was going to be busy killing Seiros and doing what he could to establish himself as a monstrous madman, a figure of terror that would overshadow all history- and more importantly, downplay the draconic contribution to the evils plaguing Fodlan. There were records that had to be forged, plans whose authors had to be rewritten, all kinds of things Claude had to do that would establish him as the great monster of the story, and Rhea just a sidenote to the tale.

( Sometimes, Hilda wondered if that wasn't part of Claude's revenge against Rhea. He would take this woman, this daughter of the Goddess, who had devastated the world so often... and he would diminish her, he would make her, in history's eyes, nothing more than his unwitting and foolish accomplice. A fine revenge, on such an arrogant monster.)

Of course, that hinged on whether or not Claude actually _could _kill Rhea... Hilda had told him that she wasn't sure his new powers would be enough. She'd argued that _all _the Deer should jump Seiros at once, that Claude should not trust that he alone could do it. She wanted Lysithea there to spit thunder and chaos out of one mouth and spells out the other while her and Lorenz gutted her, while Marianne and Ignatz turned their Hierophant powers against their supposed master and Claude rained arrows down from above... she was a stronger fighter than Claude, no need to take stupid risks.

He'd told her no. He needed them in other places. Claude had sworn he could do it himself, that he'd simply attack her by surprise.

It could work. Hilda had seen enough great warriors go down to sucker punches in her day; Jeralt was the classic example, murdered by Shamir by surprise when, in a straight-up fight, he could have beaten her to death while drunk. Perhaps it would work... but the risks of failing were so high.

Seiros, after all, wasn't _active _at the moment. Oh, she had her experiments and her obsession with her mother's Crest Stone, but she was content to sit in the Throat, enjoy tea, and let Claude do all the heavy lifting. Seiros wasn't paying attention, that was how they were getting away with so much. Victory was finer than wine, and Seiros was drunk on it; having conquered most of Fodlan she viewed all that remained as basically clean-up work.

Seiros, distracted, was not so deadly... but if Claude failed to kill her... she'd _stop _being so distracted.

A failed assassination attempt would wake her _up_, that was the danger, wasn't there an old saying about sleeping dragons and letting them lie? The metaphor did not matter when the meaning was so literal, and that saying applied double, triple, an infinite number of times more to a dragon with a god-complex and a pathological hatred of humanity. Seiros, asleep, had still done all this harm... Seiros, awake....

Hilda shuddered to think of it.

It wasn't just Seiros' own power. She wasn't really a dragon anymore, after all, no matter how deadly her hated human form was.

No, the problem was her _mind. _Hilda had examined Seiros' military campaigns, both the relatively recent ones she'd waged in Almyra as Rhea to unify that land under her domain, and what little they knew of the more ancient ones she'd done under her own name, and they'd been _brilliant_. The secret records Claude had stolen over the years, revealing how the ancient war had played out, had taught her just how smart Seiros really was... if she bothered to put her mind to it. She'd been in a bad position until Nemesis rebelled, but she learned fast...

She'd even burned all humanity's knowledge. She'd gotten control of an Agarthan weapon- something called the Javelin of Light, though some of the records indicated there were multiple Javelins? They weren't really sure what that was about. But all sources agreed that she had used them to wipe out cities and libraries and other things, things that mattered and made things, things that recorded human science, things the records called factories and laboratories and communication networks and computer centers. It had been Seiros' last great act, her final fuck-you before Nemesis and his Elites had broken her at last... but it had been too late.

All the things that held human knowledge, now lost, now dust, they'd had to work to recreate anything at all. None of humanity's ancient wisdom, either gifted by the Goddess or learned by their own hard work, had survived...

Except, perhaps...

(A flash in her mind, the image of Mercedes, as she had been in her last brave moments, the arrow the holy woman had held to her own throat, a sacrifice for the future. The notebook, that Hilda kept with her at all times, and all the secret things it said, the hope that Hilda carried with her that was heavier than her axe had ever been. The thing that might make the dream real yet, and they hadn't even known it existed when they started, the proof that someone had to be looking out for the last and loneliest House of Garreg Mach, that all the horrors they endured and inflicted would be worth it in the end.)

Mercedes... of all the things Hilda had done, that one stuck with her, that one filled her nightmares when images of the pens beneath House Goneril did not, when her mind did not make her relive what she had seen in those cells. She had done so much evil, for the greater good they sought, but Mercedes was the one that haunted her the most, and she hadn't even killed the woman.

(_But you did_, truth whispers inside her. _You brought her death to her, you killed her as certainly as anyone who has ever met your axe._)

...But now was not the time to think about it. No, she... she had to stop thinking about it. Focus on something else, Hilda, breathe, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe...

Breathe in, breathe out.

After a few secodns, she recovered. She adjusted the hat again, a nervous tic, and forcibly redirected her thoughts towards the headgear. She'd kept the hat as a trophy after it had fallen from Dorothea's worried head, the Eagles fleeing to save their Emperor, and she'd cleaned and maintained it over the years, even had it professionally resized for her head. She took comfort in it now, popped open a hand mirror to see just how stylish she looked.

She actually looked a bit odd with it on, but she liked it. Besides, every bad guy needed a weird quirk in their appearance, or nobody would remember them at all. Dorothea used to be an actress, she knew how it went. The operas didn't get sung about normal looking folks, you needed a weird hand, or a really unique piece of jewelry, or... or _something_.

It was one reason Hilda was delighted that Edelgard had lost an eye; an eyepatch was _just _the thing for a little extra oomph in a person's looks. It was a perfect thing to have, too, it reminded anyone looking at her that Edelgard had lost things too, united her with her devastated country.

And it wasn't like it had slowed her down; despite eventually winning against her, Hilda had been hard-pressed. Edelgard fought like a sack of wolves with rabies; if it hadn't been for Hilda's armor being so heavy, and the pure water she'd downed beforehand, Edelgard would have killed her.

Still, if Edelgard had her eyepatch, Hilda was going to need something, too. Something for the opera to remember her by.

So she'd popped Dorothea's stolen hat triumphantly atop her pink head. If she was going to play the role of villainess, she was going to do it in _style_.

Her nerves, lowered, threatened to rise again, the endless cycle of panic. Breathe in, breathe out. You'll... you'll be okay.

( _Just a little while longer, than you can rest, just a little while longer._)

Breathe in, breathe out.

Calmed, she relaxed back into her chair, muscles having tensed up as she thought about... well, everything.

Lysithea spoke up, having noticed Hilda had stopped brushing her hair.

“ You alright, Hilda?”

“ I'm fine,” Hilda said, and Lysithea gently bumped her hand with her huge head. “ Just... well, bad memories.”

No one was more familiar with that than the Deer, so Lysithea said no more on it, and the two sat there in relative peace for a few more moments, Hilda's hand on Lysithea's head a source of stability for her.

When the warped Deer spoke again, it was on a different topic.

“ I had a dream again, Hilda. This morning, I slipped away from myself for a few moments, and I dreamed.”

“ Oh? Do tell,” Hilda said.

Hilda heard it with one ear as she ran down her recent history in her mind, reliving good moments to help her keep calm. These last three days had been, well, fun. The capital of Adrestia had been in need of a good cleansing, and they were just the women to do it. Hilda had been playing the role of vaudeville villainess, giving her the freedom to do anything she wanted; to execute anyone who needed it, claim petty cruelty or sadistic urges, and have no one look twice; it'd been a blast, to wander Enbarr like the world's cutest serial killer.

“ It was our world this time, us, but Byleth chose a different house than Edelgard's. Several times, did she choose a different house to be professor over. The dream had three variations; I even saw a world where she joined us.”

No one had yet realized that Hilda was creating holes in the local Alliance leadership; not the real big guys, she couldn't kill them without trouble, but nobody looked twice when she went after the middle management. Shame that it was already causing problems for the local administration... shame that no one was noticing.

Hilda was too perky to play the cold, calculating mastermind very well, that was more a Lorenz thing, but the joyful, clownish murderess, that role she could play, and excel at. Already her and Lysithea had fought off a pack of assassins sent by some terrified Alliance middle official or another, which she viewed as a sign of great progress. One was still alive in a technical sense; Hilda had used one of Claude's poisons to freeze the man's limbs in place. He'd talk, soon enough, and then she'd have more targets to hunt.

“ What was that like? I doubt Claude and her would end up happy at the end of it all. You can't go back from being monsters...”

Lysithea snorted at that with two pairs of nostrils. “ No one knows that better than me... but I get what you mean. Hmm. Give me a moment. Let me see if I can organize it into something sensible...”

As Lysithea paused to arrange her thoughts, Hilda pondered Enbarr. So many loyalists, so much work for the axe. She had always been Claude's executioner, and it had always been one of her favorite roles to play. Someone had to do it, and there was a sense of finality, of work being done, when you cut off a bastard's head. The only role she'd enjoyed more was that of liberator, lockbreaker, and there was a bittersweet taste to those memories, her great hunts with Lysithea, the good she did tainted by recollections of her family and the things they had done.

Lysithea, of course, had the role of Hilda's pet monster, and she'd had a blast with it. Between being sinister and pretending to be bestial, she'd had a ton of fun- and pretend it really was, knowing these were her last days had given Lysithea's mind the drive it needed to stay focused and functioning. She only failed to be herself for short periods each day, usually in the morning when her waking mind couldn't quite corral her bestial instincts.

She'd had the chance to “randomly” savage a lot of people who deserved it, and scare the homegrown resistance of Enbarr entirely out of the capital, running the band of smugglers and spies into the surrounding towns, where, eventually, Edelgard would pick them and add them to her great rebellion. They'd be able to tell Edelgard ways to break into Enbarr, particularly through the sewers, which Hilda was deliberately leaving open. It sounded like the kind of thing a mad villainess would miss and that some heroic rebel would figure out, it'd play well when the story got told.

Of course, Hilda also fully expected the Eagles to surprise her with something she hadn't thought of. They hadn't survived all these years with Claude at their throats just to fuck up invading Enbarr.

Lysithea spoke up, interrupting her train of thought.

“ So... things were... very different. You're right about not being able to go back, but Byleth never was a monster, not like we are now. Rhea would not stomach Byleth, not once she figured out what she was. Claude had still been the Storm Caller, but everything after Garreg Mach's fall was different. We... we joined Byleth, our loyalty to her was greater than our loyalty to Claude... and she could not join him. Not just because Rhea would not let her, but because she was horrified by what Claude had done, by her father dead in the dirt and Remire and all the rest of it.”

Remire, which was on Claude's lips when he awoke far too often. Hilda knew, she had helped him through more than one nightmare. “ Understandable,” she said.

Lysithea grunted, nuzzled Hilda's hand. “ Indeed,” she said. “ We were rebels, fighting the Alliance from within. Claude accepted it, and... well. We lived, but Claude died... he got us to the end, he was betraying Rhea to help Byleth, but at the end of things he went berserk, Hilda, he could not handle the powers he used to defeat the Prophet. Byleth had to kill him and he died in her arms... that Byleth had loved Hubert, of all people, who had joined our House in the innocent days of white clouds, and I feel almost like love might have saved Claude... but... bah. I've never been a romantic.”

“ I am, though! I think that sounds kind of nice, actually,” Hilda said with a smile. “ So, wait... are you telling me I abandoned Claude in that world? I would never!”

“ You didn't,” Lysithea said with a giggle. “ No, you were with him. You died here in Enbarr, doing exactly what we're doing now- you had some pretty good villainous one-liners, it was pretty impressive. I should write them down, we could use them for inspiration once the Eagles get here.”

“ How'd you get into Enbarr?” Hilda asked, intrigued despite herself.

“ Sewers,” Lysithea said. Hilda chuckled.

“ So Hubert was a Golden Deer, huh?”

“ Him and Ingrid, yes, Byleth had specifically wanted more stoic souls to counter our... boisterous personalities,” Lysithea said, and Hilda chuckled at that. “ But we never swore the oath, never made our great promise... just you and Claude made that promise, I think. You did it all by yourselves, and towards the end he even got to kill Rhea with his own hands, he surprised her and it _worked_, Hilda. It was barely enough, even with Seiros caught completely by surprise, even with you helping... but it worked.”

Well. That made Hilda feel a bit better, silly as it was to rely on the dreams of her poor mutated friend... but she had just been worrying about that, and it was nice to take comfort in something.

“ Let's hope that works out twice, then,” she said. “ Anything else interesting?”

“ You were a hell of an opponent. Wasn't even a Hierophant, just a top-class asskicker.”

“ Good,” Hilda said smugly. “ I don't intend to job to Edelgard, she's got to earn her fancy chair back from me.”

Lysithea chuckled at that, then gave her what passed for a smirk on her broad face.

“ But here's the real question: what terrible test must Dorothea pass to get her hat back from you?”

Hilda laughed at that. “ Like hell she's getting the hat back, I won it fair and square. Edelgard can take her throne but the hat's mine.”

Lysithea chuckled, then made a thoughtful noise, rendered weird by her echo.

“ I've had so many dreams of late... it's weird, I'm more awake than I've been in months but in those little seconds that I am still asleep, I dream such long dreams. I'm remembering more of them, too. Two dreams have I dreamed, and here's an interesting point of trivia: Byleth teaming up with Dimitri is one of the worst results.”

“ How so?” Hilda asked.

“ Our plan works, we swear the oath and make the promise... but the Lions never learn... anything... the notebook is never found. He never sends Mercedes to hunt it, because Byleth escapes Garreg Mach with them, she does not fall... and with the Sword of the Creator and all Byleth's power at his side from the war's start, he is not rendered so desperate that he needs to send Mercedes out. It is victory, of sorts, but not... not the right kind... The silver moon is silver, not gold, it is valuable but not as valuable as it should be, not as good as verdant flowers or crimson wind or even azure snows...”

Hilda kept scratching Lysithea as her words started to slur into gibberish, trying to keep her focused, and she approved, rumbled and pushed against her hand before she kept talking.

“ Edelgard dies in that world, too- she dies most of the time, I guess... So did Claude, eventually, and all of us, too.”

“ Makes sense,” Hilda said. “ We made the promise, after all.”

She pondered a moment, and then asked the question that was bugging her.

“ Does Claude... always die?” Hilda asked, not sure why that mattered, why she felt like... like it might be _important. _These were just dreams... right? “ Seems unfair.”

“ He's died in all three dreams I've dreamed that had us in them,” the great dragon-beast said. “ We die most of the time too. Byleth siding with us saved our lives, but the rest of the time... we die, Lysithea. We die.”

“ Ugh,” Hilda said. “ I was hoping for... ah, well, it doesn't matter. When does Dimitri die, though, you haven't said anything about him dying!”

“ Dimitri's rather hard to kill, as far as I can tell... Only one timeline in which he dies, in which Byleth joins the church after she wakes up, when formerly she'd teamed up with us... she's accompanied by a young woman named Kronya, along with others- she saves the Archbishop in that one- Dimitri gives his life to save them, and you killed him, Hilda. Claude's great executioner in that timeline... Byleth signing up with the Church leads to a winter of azure snow, teardrops turned into frost over a lot of graves... a lot of people die... Byleth's so special, her decisions carry so much _weight. _I pity her. The terrible burden of such choices.”

Lysithea grew silent, finally grunting and writhing in the pool, churning the water with her lanky, serpentine form.

“ Is your split bothering you again?”

Lysithea sighed at Hilda's question.

“ Yes. Could you... I'm sorry, you're comfortable. Don't worry about it.”

Hilda put her drink down and rose up.

“ No, it's no trouble!”

She hummed as she reached down into her personal bag, one that she always kept with her, full of medical supplies for Lysithea, a handful of hatchets- Hilda was never truly unarmed- and the little red notebook, carefully preserved from whatever place Mercedes had managed to pull it from, so long ago. Things she could not trust with anyone, that mattered too much to be left be.

From that bag, she pulled out a bottle of medical oils- something half lotion and half vulnerary, not intended for wound care so much as it was for pain relief. With a sponge, she gently applied it in the split between Lysithea's faces. That was the place that always hurt the most, and Lysithea rumbled pleasantly as Hilda tenderly rubbed the ever-sore spot and brought blessed relief.

“ Oh, that's... that's nice. Thank you, Hilda.”

Hilda grinned as both Lysithea's faces smiled at her, or at least, made the best fascimile they could with their shared jaws. She'd always enjoyed taking care of Lysithea, her friend and her mount both, particularly on the great hunts that brought her so much peace. Lorenz had his women, Ignatz had his art, Marianne collected Church relics and saved them from Rhea's purges, Claude had his little brown notebook of poems in classic Almyran style... and Hilda had the blood of slavers and the lives of freed slaves. Different strokes, different folks.

“ But back to Byleth. Being special... that's what Solon's notes said, though I must confess I didn't truly understand them. I'm an axewoman, not a mage or a priestess. I'm just glad you four mages took over all that; I'm no clever study, I'm afraid. I didn't even know what a homunculus was.”

Lysithea chuckled again, shifting in the water so that the coolness would spread around her strange skin, enjoying the relief Hilda's ministrations brought. She was never really _without _pain, but a dull ache was better than the sharp stabs running through her skulls.

“ Few people do. Rare and ancient magic. Even we had to spend so _long _just _staring _at those stupid papers... me and Lorenz worked on the magic, Marianne and Ignatz worked on the faith part of it. I can't comment on the whole Sothis mess much, but a homunculus... well... the empty man had those, in one of my dreams. Dark magic to make a thing that looks like a human body, but isn't one... that's the short version of it. Solon added something new to the mix, using Sothis' Crest Stone. The soul of a god... light incarnate... it's a wonder Byleth didn't explode. His first twelve attempts did, according to his notes, their bodies literally popped out of existence, burnt to cinders.”

“ Oof. Why'd that happen?” Hilda asked.

“ Bodies weren't dark enough, couldn't handle the light. Things need... a balance. Like a math equation where he had too few negative numbers to come out to zero. He had to go further, invest even more shadow into the next one, to balance out the light, and they still kept bursting on him. But, finally, he figured out how to make a homunculi so stuffed with darkness that it was equal to a god.”

“ How'd a mortal manage to do that?” Hilda asked.

“ Agarthan technology, and a few items of the Goddess Herself. He had it brought to Garreg Mach in secret, placed underneath the monastery. He used it, stuff he barely understood, along with more mundane methods and a whole lot of time and resources... but it worked. He was seeking darkness enough to equal divinity, a living dark god to hold the power of a dead god of light. It took two decades, a gold cost in the hundreds of thousands, and ancient technology to build Byleth... but he _still _didn't know why she worked when the other's didn't. The Agarthan tech he was using wasn't exactly what he thought it was but it worked well enough, apparently.”

Hilda sat back and took another sip of her wine, pondering.

“ How the hell did Jeralt end up with her?”

“ Good question,” Lysithea answered. “ Solon had no idea how. One day he served, the next Garreg Mach was on fire and he was leaving with a baby.

“ Wild,” Hilda said.

Lysithea hummed an affirmative response, moving her huge warped faces away, lifting a great twisted hand and spearing with one mighty talon a chunk of the pork the servants had left.

Servants who had noted over the last three days that, despite all appearances, Hilda and Lysithea had done them no harm whatsoever, that they were even polite to them, respectful. Servants noticed such things, their lives dependent on them- and noted, too, that for all Hilda's giggling and cheerful bloodlust, for all Lysithea's monstrous growls, neither had harmed a servant.

Thus it was that the servants of the palace, alone of all Enbarr, respected them more than they feared them, and had some inkling that they were different, somehow, though neither of the Deer knew any of this.

Lysithea popped the pork into her mouth and messily chewed the pork with her awkward jaws, which had been cooked until the skin crisped. Food had no flavor for her now, but it still had texture, and she liked the sensation of hardened skin bursting in her sharp teeth. It was the reason she'd asked for wyverns as meals; she liked the way their scales popped in her teeth, the way living food was warm in her mouths, the feel of chewing on freshly-killed meat. Texture could do for taste.

Hilda drank her own wine, listening to the pop and crackle of Lysithea's meal, just enjoying the flavor of a too-sweet, just-right vintage, until Lysithea was done and could speak again. Hilda leaned forward, withdrawing a large cloth, and wiped Lysithea's jaws clean as she talked.

“ A god of night with a god of light inside... that'll be interesting," Hilda said, pondering that as she cleaned up her friend. Lysitha didn't like being such a messy eater, but not much you could do when your mouth was made that way. " How does that work out for us?"

Lysithea nuzzled her gently when she was done, rubbing her great head against Hilda's hug.

“ It works out well. Thank you. And... one more thing, Hilda I dreamed that it worked. I dreamed that it was all worth it; it worked, in the end. Claude's scheme works.”

Hilda paused, and then gave her another big hug, a stronger, more real hug.

“ Good,” Hilda said fiercely. Foolish to take comfort in these things... but if she was taking comfort, why not take it all?

Lysithea leaned into the hug, and did not tell her the truth- that she had made that last part up- she had not dreamed of what would happen at the end of this timeline at all. What she'd just said was little more than a happy lie.

The warmth of Hilda hugging her neck banished any doubts in her mind that she'd done the right thing.

**MARIANNE'S PARALOGUE**

**TO MAKE A FOOL OF THE DEVIL**

Marianne woke up muzzily. She was in her hospital bed, she knew, as she had been put there last night after Catherine's desperate race back to the Throat had finally finished, burning out four horses along the way and... not sleeping, as far as Marianne remembered, though even her absurd, Hierophant-enhanced constitution had not been enough to keep her more than semi-conscious.

Seiros' voice crawled in the back of her skull as she blinked away sleep, roaring from where she had locked it away. _Traitor!_ It hissed, knowing all she knew. _Liar!_

But Marianne had fought voices screaming obscenities at her in the back of her mind for long years. This voice was much easier to fight than the suicidal thoughts had been; after all, those had been her own voice, if warped by her sorrow and pain. This was an outsider, this voice had been artificially implanted in her, and so she had an easy enough time ignoring it.

_ Liar, yes,_ Marianne responded to that voice as she awoke, silencing it for a moment. _But divine lie it is, for this lie shall make a fool of the devil. Goddess-in-Byleth, hear me: give me strength to lie._

(_Stop praying to me, _Sothis begged, inside Byleth, even as that prayer filtered through their shared soul and her famished divinity fed on the faith inside. _Let me sleep, let me dream, let me not be here in this awful place, this horrible world, let me sleep!_)

“ How are you feeling?” Seiros asked as Marianne's eyes opened.

_Speak of the devil, and you shall find her standing next to your hospital bed_, Marianne thought tiredly. There was a smile on Seiros' visage, gentle and motherly, and Marianne wanted to rip her face off for the insult. Seiros had never nurtured anything but her own wrath, and when the Goddess-in-Byleth reached the Dragon's Lair, she would tear her head off with the Sword of the Creator.

But for now... the promise and the plan and the scheme and the dream. The mantra that had let all the Deer play their parts, all these years.

“ Recovering, holiest one,” Marianne replied. “ I apologize for my failure. I should have been able to stop the Black Eagles.”

“ Catherine described the situation for me,” Seiros said, waving one delicately manicured hand dismissively. Marianne's nose, over-sensitive ever since her transformation, smelled whiffs of massage oils. For all Seiros' professed disdain of her form, she spent a lot of time being pampered; was there nothing she could not be a hypocrite about? “ You cannot be blamed for not being able to defeat a foe who shouldn't have been there. According to Catherine, you slew many of them, even despite being surprised.”

“ Catherine is truly kind,” Marianne offered. What a mess that fight had been. She hadn't expected to see Black Eagles at all, and had to improvise. The reports said they would have been Lorenz' problem, not hers... but it wasn't the first time the Deer had to play their part by ear. She was just grateful the Eagles had proven strong enough that she hadn't had to fob her part of the battle too badly to be convincing as the loser- not after Annette dropped all the fire of Arianrhod on her. When had the littlest Lion learned to roar so loud?

“ She, too, was a magnificent warrior in the fight,” Marianne offered, and did not smile on remembering Byleth cutting the lovestruck fool. Seiros' voice railed against her for mocking Catherine, but anybody whose first instinct on seeing Rhea was _hey, I love you_ was about the damndest fool Marianne had ever met.

“ Indeed,” Seiros said, placing a hand on Marianne's arm. From anyone else, it would have seemed sweet, concerned, motherly. From Seiros, it seemed... possessive. “ I almost lost you.”

“ I am still here to serve,” Marianne replied, as she had for many years now. Her own little joke. She never said _whom _she was serving.

(Claude and the Goddess-in-Byleth, always, always them. Claude, who prepared the world for the Goddess-in-Byleth, her very own prophet in the wilderness, making the world ready so that, in time, she could arise and on a carpet of Deer bones, make a better world.)

“ Indeed,” Seiros said with a smile. “ And not only are you soon to be joined by Ignatz as a Hierophant, but Catherine shall have her reward, too; I am stepping up our production of Hierophants.”

Long practice kept Marianne's surprise off of her face. Stepping up... but the cost and time involved...

“ Praise the Goddess,” she said automatically, as her mind pondered. “ A miracle? I believed Hierophants were slow to make....”

Seiros smirked. She was friendlier with her Hierophants, more open about the hatred and contempt that slithered around in the darkness of her veins. “ A miracle, and a bit of human inspiration. Your former race has some uses, apparently. I can't believe it took me this long to make use of them as a resource, but I suppose that's the benefit of hindsight. I've been terribly lazy, but at least I _did _figure it out eventually. Cyril gave me the idea to have humans help me, and I spread it to a larger taskforce; Hierophants should be much easier to make. Safer, too.”

Goddess-in-Byleth, what the hell had the little bastard done? Marianne kept her rage off her face as Rhea's voice in the back of her skull laughed in triumph. “ I am grateful that my once-people can serve you so well, holiest one.”

Shit. What were they going to do now?

“ I am as well,” Seiros said with a benevolent grin, magnanimous in victory. “ If this pans out like I hope it will, I may yet even regain myself... I suppose I shall have to grant Cyril a reward, for such fine service. Perhaps I will make a Hierophant of him, too. That seems a fitting reward- uplift him from his base humanity. You are not _quite _Nabatea...”

She ran a carefully-sharpened nail down Marianne's arm. The Golden Doe did not shiver, but it was close.

( _Goddess-in-Byleth, protect me from your daughter_, Marianne prayed, and Sothis wept.)

“ But you are so much more acceptable than humans. I think... maybe I should give you a different name. Hierophant I named you, when I had the idea that you would be rare servants of mine, but if you get more common... well, you'll need a new name. A prerogative of Divinity, I suppose; my mother created us Nabataea, and I have created you Hierophants... I've a right to rename you. Hmm. Something to ponder in the future.”

What arrogance, Marianne thought sharply. Sothis made her Children out of her divine blood and her own will; all Seiros could manage was warping humans into monsters. The acts did not compare. Hierophants were not some new race, but a lessening of the two great races of the world into something weaker, slaves to Rhea's will, beneath dragons or humans both.

“ We are your creations,” Marianne said, lying, her tone warm and pleasant. “ I am pleased to bear whatever name you give me and my kind. I am merely grateful to have been chosen.”

“ I always did like that about you, Marianne,” Seiros said. “ Your gratitude. You know that I saved you, and you appreciate it. So few are appropriately grateful to me.”

Marianne blushed, something she'd learned to do on command. The scheme had made fine actors of all of them, for this great play that had for its audience all the world. Someone had once said that you can't fool all of the people all of the time; the Deer thought that person was a quitter.

“ I must leave, so that I can oversee the last steps of Ignatz's ascension,” Seiros said. “ Rest, and heal.”

Marianne lay back her head, and tried not to wonder if Ignatz would destroy this whole thing, if all the work and mental exercises and practice he'd put himself through to become a candidate for Hierophant would hold, and if he would still be himself when he awoke. This was the riskiest part of the plan, this attempt to make sure she had fewer Hierophants that were loyal to her, so that an army of monsters was not at Rhea's side.

Not part of the original plan. Part of the improvisation they'd all done over the years, though this particular improv session cost them more than most- they couldn't risk Rhea having an army of such warriors at her command. They had to delay the process as much as possible. Marianne had volunteered, so that Rhea would waste her time on her- she kept delaying the transformation as best she could, sabotaging her supposed “ascension”- but eventually there came a day when the change was on her, and to her surprise, she... lived. Survived.

Ignatz had volunteered later, once Marianne confirmed it was survivable, and that the Deer's secrets could be kept safe. Rhea had so much trouble making Hierophants, she had to spread them so thin in her forces; with Ignatz, too, that meant that of the three Hierophants she'd made, only one was really loyal.

But if she could make more so easily now, so swiftly now... they had to act fast, but Marianne was still recovering, and had no way to send a message to Claude. She could only hope Ignatz would not spill his guts as to what they were doing.

_Goddess-in-Byleth, help us all_, she prayed, and wondered how Lorenz was doing, and if his great and terrible work was done.

(And Sothis, dragged by that prayer, could not help but follow, her divine attention focusing on the Bridge even as she tried, desperately, to ignore the world that hurt her so.)

**SETETH'S PARALOGUE **

**BETRAYAL AT THE BRIDGE**

The Great Bridge of Myrddin was a hub of activity this late afternoon, Alliance soldiers setting up defenses and preparing the place for battle according to plans made years ago by Lorenz, who had defended it from all comers for half a decade. Huge ballistae were set up on either end, shooting log-thick bolts that could tear through entire groups of men, flinging great spears fit for the hands of giants. These deadly weapons were spaced such that each monstrous crossbow was covered by at least two others, so should an enemy steal one of the great weapons, it would easily be cleared by fire from others, each piece protecting every other piece in an overlapping field of fire.

Hidden pits were dug before the Bridge's southern entrance, their bottoms filled with vicious spikes, and then covered over cleverly with thin mats of living plants. These traps would slow any advance of cavalry or infantry, and a great map was drawn up in the central command chamber of each pit, so that after the battle they could be filled and normal traffic resumed.

Mini-towers were constructed along the great Bridge, hooked to one another with covered wooden bridges, loomed over the Bridge's street level paths, each meant to allow archers and commanders both a better view of the battle, and a place from which to rain hell down on enemy attackers below. Great cauldrons of oil were made ready to put to boil, and stones gathered for the great catapults at the Bridge's center, which could rotate and attack targets on either end of the vast thoroughfare.

Just as the great engines and traps were laid, so too were the human and animal soldiers getting ready for war. The fires of smithies roared and hammers sang on steel as swords were unbent, axes sharpened, dents in armor pounded out and horseshoes nailed in. Wyverns and pegasi riders patrolled the skies constantly, and scouts flew in from the south at regular intervals, reporting what they saw- though from the snatches of it Seteth caught as he and what was left of his elite troop flew in, the Black Eagles and the Kingdom Grand Army hadn't left Gronder Field yet.

That didn't surprise him. After a battle that big, any army would have to sit down and take a day or two to consolidate, to figure out who was lost and take stock of equipment and get everyone organized to move out again- much less two whole armies, who had to be careful not to step on each other's toes as they did those things.

That delay would prove fatal. As this Bridge was, right now, Seteth would not have wanted to lead the army attacking it; already it was a nasty prospect to fight. In a day's time, the extra prep would render the Bridge the hardest single point in all of Fodlan, unassailable from without.

Even the food and equipment were top-notch. A massive cafeteria- located next to the officer's quarters by some wise architect- held excellent chefs of Derdriu hired by Lorenz, who were whipping up hot meals. Lorenz' troops were not forced to subsist on tooth-crunching hardtack, but on fine meals of fresh bread, spiced vegetables and grilled meat- and as anyone knew, a hearty meal could make a soldier fight twice as well.

As for equipment, beyond the work the smiths were doing, each soldier was being issued a provision pack for which no expense had been spared. These provision packs had vulneraries, rations, torches, extra arrows, cigarettes and even a single draught of pure water each, which must have been exorbitantly expensive to buy... but the soldiers appreciated it, and talked warmly of their brilliant commander, who spent all his gold for them, and had never once led them into a fight they could not win.

Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, who the troops cheered, who spent his family's vast fortune not on a rich man's toys or some weird, perverse hobby, but on his army, on taking care of those who served him, and the sentiment echoed by every voice was this: whatever Lorenz wanted, they would see done, or die trying.

He'd lost once or twice, of course, but the common soldier dismissed those as the inevitable runs of bad luck any person had to deal with; otherwise, their young commander had the respect of even the oldest veteran. He had safeguarded them through half a decade of bloody war; they were confident they would survive this, too.

Hell, Lorenz' only flaw was he liked fucking a bit overmuch; and what asshole would begrudge the commander a moment's peace between the sheets with a willing, well-paid lady?

So morale was high; no enemy force had ever taken the Bridge, and no matter what the scattered survivors of Gronder said, these men knew their business. The Black Eagles might be legendary, but so was Myrddin's Great Bridge, and the Bridge's legend was older.

Discipline was tight; some of the best commanders in Lorenz' army were stationed here, and their men moved as one, ready for war. These were warriors so drilled in what to do in battle that it became a second skin overtop their first, natural to them now, the kind of men who seemed less professional out of battle because they had proven their discipline when it counted.

Between such motivated, skilled defenders, the narrowness of the Bridge, and the fortifications, the bridge would be almost invincible when it was done; Lorenz was a fine strategist, Cichol had to admit.

Which made what had happened at Gronder Field even more confusing.

Seteth flew in, soldiers saluting him as he went- but he barely noticed. The pain in his arm was growing, despite all his efforts. Perhaps Lorenz had a healer on staff who could treat the wound.

(Lurking in the shadow of his cells, looming large as the Goddess' anger, the ghost of the grim dragon smirked, as his curse began to take slow hold. No healer could heal a wound made by sheer force of hate, and Cichol would die an agonizing death by inches, for his betrayal of his Goddess and his daughter both, and the grim dragon's spectre wished the king of Faerghus well, for his hands had delivered draconic vengeance at long last.)

He landed his troop in the area prepared for them, a stable in the Bridge's middle for officer's wyverns and pegasi. It wasn't really a proper stable- more of a landing zone- but it served its purpose. Sand had been distributed to soften the landing, and a small pen erected with deeply secured posts to tie flying beasts too.

It was relatively near the officer's quarters- and the commander's office, conveniently. He needed to speak with Lorenz.

The stable was just a wide open space, big enough for a pack of wyverns to land in. He and his troop landed, and attendants rushed forward to take their wyverns. One, seeing his arm, spoke up.

“ Sir, do you need a healer?”

“ **Not yet,**” he growled out. He left his helmet on; the reverb effect would make it easier to interrogate Lorenz, and it would hide his discomfort from his wound. “ **I'm going to speak with the commander. Riders, flank me.**”

The attendant quailed, and nearby attendants did their best to seem less noticeable, hoping not to draw his rage, though he had never attacked his own troops or servants, human or otherwise. He was... not _entirely _a monster.

( _Yes you are, Father_, came his sweet Cethleann's voice, and... he could not bear to face her. He had attacked the enemy leaders at Gronder Field, but he had not intervened when she attacked, because seeing her on that battlefield... he could not... he could not, _would _not fight his little girl, and he could not face her, either, not... not when some part of him knew what he'd become. He had wanted to save her, five years ago, save her from Seiros' rage and hide her away from all the world, safe, safe, _safe, _protect her the way he had failed to protect her mother, but now he could not bear for her to see him like this...)

He stalked forward, his troops falling in line around him. Soldiers moved about him on the grey stone, the metal edifice of this masterwork looming over him, the entire place a frenetic, but not frantic, military beehive- a lot of people in a lot of hurry, but nobody in a lot of _panic_. Discipline, which had been so lacking at Gronder Field... but discipline wasn't a switch you could turn on or off, an army had it or it didn't, this... something was _wrong_. Seteth had not lived all these centuries without developing a sense of danger and right now it was _screaming _at him.

Something was wrong.

More and more inconsistencies popped to mind as Seteth crossed the short distance from the stable to the command center. Liquor for the troops provided before battle, almost never a great idea... but his work here showed Lorenz knew what he was doing, so why? The discipline problems that ran so endemic. Why so many archers? Seteth had studied Lorenz' record before joining his army, it said he had a taste for cavalry and mixed armies, not... not some moronic block of archers, overrun in seconds when the weak frontline did not hold. The decision to fight at Gronder Field at all was now questionable; it was one thing to crush an enemy at a location important to them culturally, it demoralized them. But to _lose _to an enemy on their sacred ground was to galvanize them, was to convince them that they were in the right and stiffen their spines.

On review...

It almost seemed like Lorenz had _planned _to lose at Gronder Field.

He burst open the door to the command center without preamble, two guards drawing arrows on him the second he did so- but one dropped his arrow when he saw who it was. His riders filled in behind him, the intimidating backdrop to his monstrous presence.

They nearly filled the room. It was small, the entire command center just a heavy, windowless stone dome whose inside was, nonetheless, a square room, though Seteth could not fathom why. It was built for safety, not comfort, a great plodding boulder of a room that could survive anything.

On the far side of the room from the door, Lorenz sat at his huge, expansive desk, and a variety of levers and gears sat next to him- ways to control different parts of the Bridge, some strange mechanical thing Claude had come up with some time ago. Goddess bless that useful, useful human. Behind Lorenz on the wall, beneath an Alliance flag, was a rack of javelins, emergency weapons in case of attack.

On the desk before him, Lorenz had divided it up into two sections. On Lorenz' right were a variety of papers, letters, and notebooks, along with a strange looking helmet or mask that was attached by a long rubber tube to what looked like a thick, heavy box- weird thing. It drew the eye, it was too out of place...

The men before Lorenz, however, ignored the device, pointing to the map that took up the other half of the desk, to Lorenz' left. It was a map of the Bridge and its surrounding area blown to huge proportion, the men placing little iron markers on it to illustrate points they were making, discussing tactics of defense and assault. They were soldiers, commanders, who spoke to Lorenz with the ease of long service, the respectful, blunt mannerisms of professional soldiers.

They turned as one to Cichol and his troops, and paled on seeing him.

“ **Lorenz Hellman Gloucester**,” he intoned. “ **We must talk.**”

“ You are dismissed momentarily, gentlemen,” Lorenz said as he rose up smoothly. “ So are the guards. Wait outside for our meeting to resume. I shall meet with the Prophet Rhea's direct representative alone.”

The men filtered out, doing their best to not touch Seteth, who loomed in the doorway, calling upon all his considerable gravitas to intimidate... though the purple-haired noble didn't seem fazed at all by it, standing at attention as formal as you could please.

“ **Watch them, Riders,**” he told his troops. He did his best work alone. “ **Make sure no one leaves.**”

His riders left, the last out shutting the door; and like all closed doors, the noise it made had a finality to it. Cichol tried not to shiver as the warning bells in his head rang and rang and rang... and this human, this

(_brave, noble_)

nobody, stood unafraid before him.

“ What can I do for you, sir?”

“ **Explain**,” Cichol boomed, but Lorenz did not even flinch.

“ I apologize, I am confused,” Lorenz said. “ Explain what?”

Cichol exploded. The pain in his hand was not conducive to keeping his temper.

“ **Your failure at Gronder Field! I was there, I saw- ill discipline, you distributed alcohol beforehand, your troop composition was wrong, there was... every single decision was incompetent! And you... you are **_**not **_**incompetent... Explain!**”

“ Ah,” Lorenz said. “ You noticed that, as well.”

“ **A blind man could!**” Cichol fumed.

“ I will explain, but I will need the entire command staff here to do so. I am afraid there is a traitor in the ranks, and your presence will help me weed them out. I left most of the preparations at Gronder to a subordinate I, foolishly, trusted; please, allow me to bring the command staff back inside, so we can figure out how far this goes. I suspect they were paid off by Dagda...”

Lorenz moved around the desk, heading to the door, as Cichol thought about what he'd said. It sounded... reasonable. If you hadn't been there. It didn't contradict any of Lorenz' apparent competence, and seemed like the sort of bad luck a man might have. Anyone could be betrayed. If you hadn't been at Gronder Field yourself, had not seen it with your own eyes... yes, you might believe that.

If Cichol hadn't been present at Gronder Field, if he was only reading that explanation in a report, it would have sounded completely plausible.

But he'd been there. He'd watched Lorenz. He'd had plenty of time to fix the mistakes he'd seen.

He stuck his good arm out, stopping Lorenz just as he reached the door.

“ **You're lying,**” Cichol said. Lorenz froze up next to him, caught, his first real reaction since Cichol had come into the room, and Cichol grinned under his mask. “ **You were in charge. I know. I was there.**”

Lorenz, paused, suddenly sighed, and stood up straight, as though a weight heavy as a mountain had been lifted off of him, as if he had suddenly been set free of some terrible burden.

Then he sucker-punched Cichol right where his hand used to be.

Cichol gave a strangled shriek as _pain _rocketed up his arm, stumbling back, mind nearly blank from pain. Lorenz raised his hands to hurl deadly magic at him, an arrow of blazing force; Cichol ducked just in time on reflex, rolling towards the desk.

His hand scrambled for the first thing he could find and it landed on the strange helmet, the mask connected to the box, and wielding the long tube between them like a flail he swung it at Lorenz. He missed, the mask shattering when he struck the stone floor with it. Lorenz hurling more fire at him, the great map bursting into ashes as missed shots set half the desk aflame.

Cichol was going to get killed in these close quarters, so he did the only thing he could; he left them. The Dragon Knight made a run for the door and rammed right through it, even as Lorenz tried to burn him to death, his shoulder charge tearing the door off its hinges and carrying him past the small, huddled group of commanders, who stared as he passed by.

“ **Lorenz has betrayed us!**” Cichol bellowed as he rolled for cover, and a fireball chased him.

“ That's impossible!” one of the soldiers said, loyalty propelling him to speak, but Cichol's riders had no such compulsions, and two ran inside to take Lorenz. Both died with javelins in their throats, gurgling out pools of blood in the doorway.

“ **Stay back,**” Cichol said. “ **Doorway's a choke point, he'll kill many of us if we try to rush him. But he's trapped in there, too. No need to get killed by being impatient. We'll burn him out. Bring up some fire mages.**”

“ You won't have time,” came Lorenz's voice from inside the command center, echoing out past the doorway- Cichol couldn't see him, where the hell was he? Hiding behind that desk? “ This isn't how it was supposed to go... but I suppose it's a better ending than I deserve. It's fitting, that I redeem my father's actions by killing Cichol, Rhea's favorite executioner. You've been killing humans a long time, long before you called yourself Seteth- and now, I'll pay it all back to you.”

“ **Why would you betray your country?**” Cichol shouted, not sure how to respond to that speech. Lorenz' own troops looked so stunned and horrified that they couldn't move, even as Cichol's riders took up their places.

This was... something was off... the alarms in his head rang louder and louder.

“ I have not betrayed my country at all, Cichol,” came Lorenz's infuriatingly calm reply. “ My country is the Fodlan Edelgard's building with Dimitri's help. My country is the land your daughter seeks to create, with the aid of the Goddess-in-Byleth, reborn again. My country is a place where humans and dragons walk side by side as friends and allies, not masters or servants, Fodlan free at last from its past.”

“ **What are you rambling about?**” Cichol said, taken aback. Lorenz sounded so... so _calm_, so _ready_, what was he planning?

“ My country is a land I will never see, but I am its proudest patriot... _we_ are its proudest patriots, me and the others...”

There was a distinctive sound, a metallic click, as of a lever being pulled.

“ For Claude- and for a better future.”

A hissing sound was the only warning they got.

Gas began to rain down from vents all along the top of Myrddin's bridge, falling at an incredibly fast rate, falling fast as rain. The gas had no smell, could barely be seen as a mere heat haze in the air, but the effects were as smothering as a blanket on a fire. Cichol took a breath of clear air one second, and when he drew in the next, he could _taste _it- a clinging, sticky syrup taste, like water rendered sour and gummy by some unknown particulate.

And it gave his lungs no sustenance. Cichol couldn't breathe. Nobody could. Soldiers collapsed, gasping, finding no air, dying in absolute silence, horses and pegasi and wyverns kicking and panicking as the air in their lungs failed to nourish their bodies. Soldiers stumbled, gasping, their life expectancies suddenly reduced to seconds, scrambling for another breath that would not come.

A man leapt off the bridge, hunting desperately for air, and got in a single screaming lungful before he impacted with the water below and splattered into red-soaked chunks of foam-flecked flesh, washed away a moment later by the river's force. The bridge was far too high to attempt such a stunt.

A few tried to ride wyverns or pegasi above the cloud, but wyverns and pegasi needed air even more than a human did, their bigger bodies burning much more oxygen- even the best trained beast could not handle this sudden strangulation, and they panicked or otherwise disobeyed orders. None who were on the ground when it began managed to get more than a few feet in the air before they dropped, and those already in the air mostly died as well- the gas had poured from the highest struts of the great bridge, and most of the flyers were underneath it. Any who caught even a whiff were doomed; flying was an oxygen-intense activity, so the effects of the gas were even more pronounced in the wyverns and pegasi.

Only a few of those who were highest in the air survived, and they could do nothing but stare as their comrades died in droves beneath them, a massacre on a scale that beggared belief.

Soldiers on the far ends ran, and a few of the swiftest and luckiest made it out, got far enough away from the clinging syrup of the gas that they could gulp down sweet air; but Cichol was in the middle of the bridge, where the command post was. He was... he was going to die.

Memories flashed through his mind as he staggered, breathless, running towards the bridge's side; he would no more survive that fall than the other soldier had, but it... he had to try _something_. His survival instinct wouldn't let him stop.

But his memories, they were all of his little girl, and his lovely wife, those times when he was happy. Watching Cethleann playing, or learning to swim. Remembering how his wife got a funny smirk on her face when she was feeling mischievous, or her seriousness in enjoying food. The way his wife had enjoyed fine meals and bad art. Cethleann's first transformation into human shape, a cute little pudgy girl with bright green hair. His wife's bright joy, her smile, her and... and...

His daughter, hurt, wounded, him hauling her somewhere safe, Seiros had hurt her so badly... but he'd went back to serve Seiros anyway, hadn't he?

What had he done?

As he tipped over the bridge's edge, he regretted, and he prayed.

_Sothis, I am so sorry. Please, forgive me._

And halfway down, something _grabbed him_, some invisible jaw gripped tight the wrist of his missing hand with teeth sharp as swords, and in his surprise he screamed out the poisoned air. He had time to draw in a single breath as the hard tug stopped his fall mid-air and dislocated his shoulder, before he began to fall again, and knew no more.

( The ghost of the grim dragon smirked as it saved his life, used all the strength it had to catch him in midair before dropping him. Cichol would not get to die by any hand but _his_.)

And down the river, Monica von Ochs, Adrestian rebel out fishing, would soon be _very _surprised by what she'd caught.

**LORENZ AND SOTHIS' PARALOGUE**

**A PLEA FOR THE GOLDEN DEER**

Inside the command center, Lorenz sat in his chair, and watched the soldiers who trusted him die.

He was still breathing fine, for the moment, save that smoke from the burning map on his desk was a little thick. The poison would take a little longer to get to him, inside the office, built to resist attack. It might even have saved him, buying him time to put on the mask, except... Cichol, by total accident- because Lorenz recognized the desperate scramble of a man for a weapon- had broken the mask that would have let him live. Some clever thing of Claude's, a mask that poison could not get through, connected to a bag in a box that was filled with good clean air.

It ran out fast, but he walked quickly. He'd have gotten to the Bridge's other side in fine shape.

But now...

He was going to die.

The emotions that flashed through him were... strange. Flickering things that bolt through the darkness of his mind just for a second before disappearing, flashes of lightning. He's frightened, of course, but... only a little.

His death was always a part of this; that he must go into the greater human spirit in _this _manner is the only surprise.

He felt relieved, in some ways; living with the knowledge that he would die has been an impossible burden to carry, and now the burden was being taken away. Come the Reaper with his scythe, and Lorenz would greet him as a friend who had been long in coming. It would grant him peace he had not known since the promise at Garreg Mach.

He actually felt... guilty. Guilty for being relieved, for his death will put a greater burden on what few Deer remain, his death here might even be fatal to the plan. Derdriu will need a new saboteur...

But on top of the relief and the guilt is the greatest emotion of all: disappointment. He is disappointed that he cannot continue in Claude's service. Edelgard would need help punching through Derdriu- well, _Dorothea _would need help, to be more honest- and now it cannot come from Lorenz' hands. Damn Cichol, damn him for being present, damn him for spoiling a plan five years in the making just because he was there at all.

Still... maybe what he'd already done would suffice. Maybe giving them the Bridge for free, alongside the damage done to the Alliance at Gronder Field and the supplies he'd left behind, would give Edelgard's Eagles a chance to take the watery capital of the Alliance, and from there, go north, to Rhea's secret base in the Throat, from where she reigned as prophet over two nations.

Maybe. Maybe. If... if he'd done enough...

Goddess, there are too many maybes, too many ifs. Possibility was a haunting thing. If Cichol had not been at Gronder; if he had not grabbed the mask Claude made, that would give him air; if Cichol had died at Garreg Mach five years ago... if. If, if, if.

So many ifs pumping through his mind as he took a breath and then, suddenly, realized it had been his last. The poison was here, its heavy weight smothering the last of the fire on his desk, putting it out, and now... now came the ending.

More ifs tumbled through his soul, the dying fire prelude to his own death. If Rhea had never come back from Almyra with death in her eyes and a monster's laugh in her throat, to savage Fodlan with the Alliance as her claws. If the Goddess had never died. If he had not found out that his father was a murderer right before the Storm Caller, Fodlan's most dangerous terrorist, pulled his mask off, and revealed the crying face of Claude beneath.

Goddess, _Claude. _His Duke, who Lorenz can, in his last moments, admit is more than worthy of being his leader. He remembered fighting about that, when they were still teenagers- remembered how childish he had been, so obsessed with his own idea of legacy that he'd never noticed how obnoxious he was.

Claude must have thought him so pathetic, the teenage boy rendered an elder by the horrors that had happened to him, and seeing the former Lorenz as the immature brat he really was. He should have been more respectful of the women around him, should have listened to the word No, should have... should have done many things. He had never truly crossed any lines, other than being an irritant in his persistence, but... he is still ashamed, to think of his schoolboy days.

...What did Claude think of, when he thought of Garreg Mach? By day, he played the foolish trickster, who danced and smiled and had his crush on Byleth that everyone knew about and thought was kind of cute.

By night, putting on that mask, and trying to figure out how to kill the woman he wanted to kiss, along with plotting the death of all Fodlan...

And beneath both of those, the man, who had sought to betray Rhea in such a way that all the past was undone, and Fodlan saved.

The sentence written on Claude's heart was just this: _let the world be better for this, and I will sacrifice everything for it_.

If any man had ever been a noble, it was Claude. A man, who had not been allowed a real childhood, who had suffered horribly, who still, despite all his pain, sought to make the world a better place...

And Lorenz had ever thought he could compete with him? Kind of funny, he had to think now, as his mouth opened and tried, desperately, to draw in air. Nothing, of course. Claude had explained the poison to him once. Coated the lungs, kept the body from absorbing air properly, a wet film over the lungs that kept air out. Lorenz was drawing in air, but his body wasn't taking any in. It dissolved fast, though, which was why the gas's sprinklers were still going, reinforcing that death in the air; if they stopped now, he might live... but he had no way to do that, the pressure in the system was so great that it could not be turned off now. They'd had to crank the pressure up so high to lift all that fluid to the very top of the Bridge, and now the lever was trapped by that selfsame pressure, he could not budge it an inch...

The shakes got worse, and Lorenz forced himself not to think of it, as desperation to breathe began to claw at his rational mind.

Claude, who had suffered so much, and deserved better... _Goddess_, they _all _deserved better, all his fellow Deer, from monstrously mutated Lysithea to Marianne, who had went from suicidal to sacrifice on Claude's word.

Even Hilda, though she hid it so much better, whose family had done things she had never told them, would never tell them, save that once at camp, Hilda had woken screaming in the middle of the night begging someone only she could see to “stop touching him!”

Lorenz had never asked. None of them had. It was the most respect they could give Hilda, who liked to pretend that her past was a dead thing, and not alive in her head. Lorenz, more than the others, knew what it was she was hiding, knew that the smugglers and black marketeers he dealt with told their own stories about Goneril, and those who were willing to work with them.

The Alliance noble had never forgotten the flashing _disgust _in the eyes of one of the worst men he'd ever known when he asked about House Goneril.

He'd hired the man initially to raid fellow Alliance nobles who had capitulated a bit too easily to the dragons, an act easily disguised as simply the usual play-by-play of noble households. The man was an easy murderer and bloodthirsty pyromaniac who knew violence as a lover... and even he was enraged at any suggestion that he'd ever worked with Goneril.

_They're disgusting_, he'd insisted, and that told Lorenz things he did not want to know, that a man like that had such an opinion of them. Even monsters had their rules, even monsters maintained a sense of distinctions in atrocity, and apparently at the bottom of the heap was Hilda's own family...

Lorenz realized, as he unconsciously gasped again for air, that of the Golden Deer, only he, Leonie, and Ignatz could claim fair and innocent childhoods. Leonie chasing the specter of Jeralt's greatness, Ignatz relatively happy- his parents loved him, they had just wanted him to be able to support himself- and Lorenz himself, so full of pride, up until he learned what his father was really like.

Even Raphael, who had left before all this, had to grow up before his time, so that he might take care of his sister, had to live with what Lorenz's family had done to his.

Raphael... Maya was safe in Enbarr. Safe with her children. That was a good thought, Lorenz could take comfort in that, could take that with him into the dark. He had saved Raphael's sister. Where his father had murdered Raphael's parents, Lorenz had saved his sister.

He hoped it was enough, that if any gods judged him, they did not put his father's sins n his back- Lorenz had too many of his own now, to bear those too.

All the Deer but the three of them... living such unhappy lives, and now to die for Claude's scheme.

Lorenz didn't mind dying himself; he had lived a happy life up until five years ago, and to sacrifice himself felt so small, in the grand scheme of things. But the others... he wanted... he wanted them to be happy, at the last moment he does not want the plan to succeed, not to save himself but to save _them_.

He did not mind dying, if his death brought Rhea down and made the dream more real than he was _glad _to die... but he wanted them to be happy. He wanted them to know what a happy life was, that they had never had before.

He wanted them to live in the dream they were giving so much of themselves to make real.

He looked down, pondering what he could do with these last few seconds to achieve his goals, and saw the black ash of the burned map, and the red blood pooled in the door from the dead wyvern riders.

Black and red... Adrestia's heraldry. A wall nearby, pristine despite the short fight in the room, and he had pen and paper on his desk already, the fire had only consumed one half of his workspace.

...An idea, so stupid that he must blame it on the lack of oxygen, his brain is strangling on the lack of air, but... but everything they have ever done is an if, is so full of maybe.

If. If he does this, will it work?

Why not try?

He picked up a pen with an arm that burned and hungered for air. It was the hardest thing he had ever done, to move, as his body sought oxygen, as his throat and lungs heaved and worked for breath that would not come. He fought the spasms down, the convulsions, wrote the simplest thing he could think of that would still convey his wishes on what turned out to be a logbook's blank cover. Goddess bless his excellent penmanship, even shaking, he could write it out legibly, if his fading eyes did not deceive him.

He picked it up, and tried to stand. His legs buckled almost immediately, his body's twitches leaping and driving, cramps starting all over. He was dying, he would not get to finish his plan.

Unbidden, a thought lanced out of his mind, a childhood habit he'd grown out of that had returned to him in the hour of his greatest desperation.

_Goddess-in-Byleth, help me. Help me save them. Please._

-

A littlest one, who had come to Fodlan from afar, who could not help but watch the desperate drama on the Bridge, heard a dying man's voice, and despaired.

The last prayer of a dying man, made in honest faith, asking not for salvation for himself, but for others. A truly selfless prayer, a heartful cry, the kind of thing she had, once upon a time, always felt so... moved by. Her favorite kind of prayer, the heroic kind, that asked not for gifts or treasures, but only that others be saved. The kind of prayers that, once upon a time, she had thought that a Goddess _should _grant, the kind that _meant _something, mortal greatness that should be rewarded with divine benevolence.

She had granted prayers like that, once upon a time.

...She wanted to sleep. She wanted to... to not see this terrible world, to see what her daughter had become. She did not want to be awake, to be forced to acknowledge that the closest thing to a true prophet she had ever had on this world was the very man who murdered her, that the man who had ended her life had, in time, come to share her dream with her. She did not want to know that her inheritor as leader of her children was not her daughter, but a scared teenage girl who had fled to that man's side.

She wanted to sleep. She wanted to dream of a better world, of other timelines, where luckier Sothis' got to be with their daughters, where her daughter inherited the crown from her fairly and decently, where that scared teenage girl lived with her happy family, where her murderer was a monster and beaten to death by holy hands and she could take her vengeance on him and be _done _with it, she could hate him honestly instead of having all these... these horrifically complex emotions, this hatred of him that was tainted with knowledge of his grief and sorrow and heroism.

Why... why couldn't any of this be _simple_?

She... she wanted to be somewhere and some_when _else. To... to exist, it _hurt_, it _hurt_ to be awake, and know that this was real.

Why was she the unlucky Sothis? Why was she the Sothis who had to be here, when other littlest ones got to be happy?

...But past it all... that prayer... the kind she had loved so much, once upon a time, her proof that these humans were not like her family, could be kind, could love another so much...

She wanted to sleep. To dream of better places.

But... his prayer, and the reasons he prayed it... they were so pure, his heart was so _pure... _

And Byleth would find her in time, the darkness would find her. What would she say to Byleth, how could she explain about _this_? She had done so much harm to Byleth already, had stolen so much from her. Solon had not revived Sothis, he had turned her into a phantasmal tick, slurping up the heart of a host so she might pretend to be alive again...

...What was she going to do? She hurt, and she had made so many mistakes, all this damage from a single moment of despair...

She didn't want to be here. She wanted... so much to be different. She understood Edelgard, she got the ashes; that was all her sleep was, her version of the ashes. A way to retreat from all the world.

...But his prayer was so honest, so open... she could not close her heart to it, could not pretend. Damn this mortal, _damn _him, for his pure and honest heart, for this wish- for that is all a prayer is, a wish seeking to be granted by divinity. A selfless wish, utterly without thought for his own circumstances, praying only for others to be saved, for the people he loved to be happy and safe...

And there was the matter of the harm she had done to Byleth, all her life, and that to not do what she was about to do would... would hurt her further still.

_Damn him_, she thought, as she reached out with her powers, and blessed him. So little of her left, her divine might a flickering spark, with trembling hands and that prayer for a conduit, she sent one of the last drops of her holiness to him, traveling at a speed past light and dark both, to a bridge and a dying man.

She could do nothing more. She simply couldn't. The being who had once reshaped Fodlan's coasts now could only bless a dying man. What... what had happened to her, what was she so _hungry _for, what... what had changed?

Or was she just what her mother had always said? Was she just a failure?

She sank down again, sinking into her own ashes, wishing the world away, for a time, and slept.

( Byleth felt all this, a roil inside her, and a sensation of something with the weight of the sun reaching out a single finger... and a name in her head. _Lorenz_.)

-

A surge of strength hit him, calmed his breaking body. Not much; but enough, enough that he could finish the work. He dragged himself up, crawled with aching legs, clenched the logbook he'd written on in his teeth as he dipped his hands down, one into the black ash and one into the red blood.

He crawled to the pristine white wall, and with his hands no longer shaking, he painted. He was no Ignatz, but he had spent nights enough watching the man's hands work that he knew how to make the simple design he sought to create.

Ignatz's art was a joy to watch, as was Ignatz himself, who was so lost in his work... it had brought some measure of peace to Lorenz, to let his friend, under the pretense of bodyguard work, indulge for just a few hours in the calling that life and circumstances had denied him. In another life, Ignatz would go down a legendary artist... but in this one...

Well, maybe he might still go down a great artist, if he survived the process of becoming a Hierophant, and if Lorenz's little scheme here worked. His hands started to shake again towards the end, as he kept working, as he drew the thing he hoped they would see, that they would _understand_.

If. Always if. But the Golden Deer were the house of chaos. The house of chance. The house of flip the coin of choice.

This was his choice.

If they saw it and understood, maybe... maybe all the Deer would get a _second _chance, and wouldn't that be a fine miracle?

If.

He finished, and he smiled as he looked at it. He wiped his hands off, took the journal carefully from his teeth, and drew one last pattern inside it, under his words.

This wasn't so bad. This... this was a good way to die. He was okay with this.

Lorenz turned around, leaned back against the wall that bore his handwork, the notebook in his lap where he sat.

Lorenz closed his eyes, tried to take in one last breath with lungs and a throat that did not work, and died.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We return, children!
> 
> More on the way. Hope ya'll enjoy!


	8. Interlude I: Of Ancient Debts (Claude and Hilda in Hell)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: this is VERY DARK. TW: Torture, implied rape, implied murder, child abuse, unwilling scientific experimentation, corpse disposal.
> 
> It is a dishonesty for a writer to shy away from the ugly parts of life, but a reader can be forgiven for skipping what hurts them. Important plot things ARE happening here, but feel free to skip this chapter if you cannot stomach the things in the warning. It's not that graphic, but better safe than sorry. 
> 
> I'll try to summarize in an endnote, so if you can't stomach the chapter, you can read the endnote instead and get the important parts.

**ACT II**

**Interlude I**

**Of Ancient Debts**

**(Claude and Hilda in Hell)**

Claude von Riegan- who was not named Claude, not really- sat in his lab, and without using his hands, tried to grab a paper.

The paper sat there, taunting him with its weight; as infinitesimal as it was, it was too much for his feeble shadow, which strained and strained under it.

Claude blew out a puff of breath. This was _ridiculous_. Not for the first time, he wondered if he should have tried something else. He had alchemical formulas for it; all kinds of things, half of which were stunts of old Agartha that Seiros had kept. Formulas to make one a colossus of steel; formulas powered by screaming rage that made one a hulking thing of muscle and bone. Stranger formulas, that promised ever more bizarre powers, though he wasn't sure how many of those were the ancient equivalent of snake oil.

But if even half of them told half the truth, then he could have turned himself into all kinds of inhuman things. Or even just become a Hierophant, how fitting would that have been, turn into Rhea's proudest creation and then murder her with it? It wasn't like he hadn't sabotaged the hell out of that process; it was actually a lot _simpler _than Rhea thought it was. You could do it in an almost irreversible way in a matter of hours; you could do it reversibly in a matter of weeks. Rhea's own arrogance had let him trick her; he'd told her that it was just “too hard” to make weak humanity like the mighty dragons, and that had pleased her, she'd _believed _him...

...It would have been so _easy_, to just make a Hierophant of himself, and fight her.

...But... no. No. Not even now, and not even against Rhea. Too many people had told the half-breed he wasn't human, all his life; he would... he would not. He was a man, and he would live and die as one, even... even in the face of the scheme and the dream, he just _couldn't. _There were lines even he could not cross.

This way was better. Every other path would... _change _him, made him not-human. This was the only route that left him as he was; a human, just a man.

A man with a _ton _of dark magic behind him, but just a man nonetheless.

So. Back to the grind.

He concentrated. It was... odd. Not like anything he could describe. He flexed muscles other people just didn't have; it would be like a bird explaining flight to an earthworm, or a fish explaining how it felt to breathe water to a dog. How to explain it? He hunted for cold calmness inside him, the well of night the potion had dug inside him, and drank from it, moving the hands of his shadow, which stretched away from him.

Weird feeling. Something leaving him, stretching out.. he reached a shadowed hand beneath the paper, and tried again, straining these new muscles with the effort.

Still... nothing. What was he doing wrong? The notes had said he would have the hands of night to do his work; though they'd been vague. Agarthans, back in the day, had a bit of a poetic streak, or, at least, a megalomaniacal one that led them to write a lot of very dramatic things about what their technology could do. While Claude could appreciate that in the abstract given his own poetic leanings, it made it frustrating to figure out just what they'd _meant_ in concrete, real-world terms.

It didn't help that half the message was garbled; Solon's note stated someone had spilled something on the damn paper, centuries ago, and ruined the lower half of what had once been a fairly clear (for an Agarthan) description. Combined with the usual wear and tear of centuries, and a cup of fucking _coffee _might prove to be Claude's greatest non-Rhea nemesis.

Thank the Goddess the formula was written above the stains. What was left was this:

_Inherit the power of the children of night; infuse the soul with shadow. The drinker will remain human, but have access to great powers of darkness. The hands of night will do their b-dding, in the f--m o- memory ma-- r--l, a-l t-- spirits of ancient humanity -- f--ms f--i-iar to the dr—ker. The creat-d ---- will be -- th--r beck a-d c-ll. The p-w-r man-fe--s as t--s- th- dr---r loved most; or those who ---ed --- imbi--- m-s-._

The rest was just a dull brown mass, save that the word “servant”, perfectly cleanly, could be picked out several lines in.

Those words, along with the formula, were written on the paper he was trying to lift, though the paper was itself a copy of one of his own copies, which had all started as a copy he'd made of one of Solon's notes, which itself was a copy of something the Church had kept in its shadow library, that hidden place in the Abyss in which all the most secret things of Agartha were kept. A copy of a copy of something stained, long ago, all he had to go on, all he had to bet his great triumph on.

But he'd bet on even thinner things before, and come out ahead. He'd have to make do. It's what he did.

Besides... he had to admit there was another reason he'd sought this power out.

Byleth.

( Her hair, sea-green in time; her strange, stoic nature, socially graceless, somehow magnificent without it; he has lived his life a lie ever since his hair turned white, but Byleth has no lie in her, and he can trust her, in those bright and happy days of Garreg Mach.)

His crush had an admittedly immature starting point, he had to admit to himself. No one had ever protected him before, the way Byleth did in the forest, saving him from his own stupid plan- not one of his better schemes, hiring those bandits. Byleth had saved him, and he had fallen in love with his rescuer, even as it could never be...

Only Hilda had ever guarded him like that before, and he was so young when Hilda started saving his life that there was no romance to it. She was more like... his family, his best friend, some weird combination of kin and servant, older sister and favored minion...

Hilda... thinking of her... it _hurt_, not having her here, it felt like someone had cut out some essential part of himself. He had relied on her for so long...

_Don't. Don't think about her._

...But trying not to think of something was the surest path to considering it, and he couldn't stop thinking of her, of his history with her, of the places in Goneril's castle where they'd met...

He felt something cold on his skin, and realized his shadow was crawling on him, but it was a gentle and soothing touch, and then it reached his eyes and the world went dark.

A light. A vision, of the cells of Goneril, a feeling as he walked, step by step, in that damp and rocky place, those caves connected to the sea.

Memories?

But... not... his hands had never looked like this, he had never had pink hair that fell around his face like this...

The dark took him, as he sat there, thinking these thoughts, his straining activating his powers at last. Claude fell away inside himself, and far away, in Enbarr, Hilda had the strangest sensation of someone's hand on her shoulder, and thought of Claude, as he dreamed her dreams.

-

Many years before the war, in the time when Jeralt marched up and down Fodlan with a child in his arms, during the last days before Edelgard's joy was drowned in the blood of Brigid, a hurt and scared little girl went down into the darkness beneath the Goneril's fortress, and found a hurt and scared little boy.

( What was this? These were her thoughts, her... how was he doing this? Claude drifted inside her head, a ghost haunting a ghost, seeing what had once been.)

Her eyes were full of terrible things she'd witnessed; terrible things her family had done to the innocent, now kept in cages at the bottom of their castle. The little girl, least of her family, mocked for her inability to match up to her brother; her brother, whose awful deeds were _applauded _by the House, heralded and loved. Hilda, the lone black sheep, mocked and hit and hurt for her kindness and gentleness, only left alive because it was more amusing to strike her than it was to leave her dead in a gutter somewhere, a fate Hilda knew she would not dodge forever.

But on this night, she slipped into the dark, down into the prison cells, and in her hands were the most unexpected things of all; a plate of food, small for an adult but as big as her hands could carry, and a large glass jar full of water.

In the dark, she went to the prisoners, and she brought them what food and water she could. Most of Goneril's prisoners were fed and watered- but not enough, never _enough_, and so the little girl's small handfuls of meat and bread, her tiny drops of drink, were worth their weight in gold.

Three trips did she make that night, all she dared do, having been warned about such behavior before; the warning was still dark on her face, a bruised and swollen-shut eye, the mark in the shape of her mother's fist.

( Claude recoiled at that. His mother and father had been rough but loving people, the kind of tough souls who have no mean bones in their bodies; for all the ridiculous stunts they'd pulled on him, they'd hugged and loved him afterwards, and he missed them terribly. For a mother to do that to her own child... he did not have words for it. Hilda was too young to feel this old and tired.)

Still she went to help them. She had done this for over a year now, even as young as she was; sneaking down here, into the dark of the cells, bringing what little comfort she could. Not all prisoners trusted her- the newest and most cynical avoided her, claiming there was something in the food that made one more pliable to their captors, or simply not wanting to accept food from a Goneril- but others did, and blessed her, the one Goneril who might be worth a damn as a human being.

It was not without cost. She had been beaten and hurt for it, as her current black eye attested to; but still she came here on her mission of mercy, a child with the tormented gaze of an adult, seeking to help. She had nightmares so often... but on days when she can feed someone hungry, or give comfort to the hurting, she can sleep, and that is a treasure more precious than unbruised flesh to her.

( Sweet Hilda, Claude thought, drifting in her young skull, seeing the shape of the woman she will become in the girl she was. His executioner, his pet monster, who was also the kindest of the Deer, who cared for all of them.)

But on the night in question, events proved momentous; on that night, she found, inside the farthest cell, a black-haired boy. He had strange marks on his flesh, and she thought she knew who had inflicted them; there was a new person in her family's guest chambers now, a tall and cruel woman who seemed much more refined than her brutish, axe-wielding kin... and much worse, somehow, into this den of monsters had come the devil herself.

( Himself... this was himself... he looked himself over. Scrawny little shit, with no idea how much _worse _it was going to get, his innocence a pennant in his soul that would soon be stripped away by crimson wind...)

No wonder her kin had fallen all over themselves to impress this stranger; they recognized their God in her, these demons felt honored and privilege to meet the mistress of Hell face to face. She did not know what the stranger was doing, but her instinct for self-preservation told her the truth- that while her family was brutal and dangerous, Rhea was another magnitude more monstrous, and to draw her attention was to die.

So far, she hadn't, and she was grateful for it, looking at this boy, who had been part of the large group of... captives... she'd brought with her.

If she called them captives, it hurt less, to know what her family did.

“ What's your name?” she asks, as she passes water to him, holding out the plate, now diminished.

“ Khalid von Riegan,” he answers, and takes the proffered drink, though he turns down the food. “ Thank you, but I... the food... stomach's not settling. Water's fine, though. What's your name?”

“ Hilda,” she said. “ Hilda... von Goneril.”

A pause... but his eyes stray to the bruise on her face, and he resumes drinking a moment later.

“ Who hit you?” he asks.

“ My mother,” Hilda replies, with a shrug, and Khalid's eyes widen in surprise, and disgust.

“ My mother never hits me,” he says. “ Mom and Dad... I don't know where they are, but... they would never.”

“ Mine would never stop,” she tells him, and the sympathy on his face is sweet.

( Claude would hug her, if he wasn't haunting her memories. What was this?)

-

The memory skips ahead, jumping, staggering; finding... things about him, he thinks, his mind recovering from his shock. Claude was always smart, and if darkness connects everyone- if your soul is just the shadow your life casts- then... perhaps he is looking at Hilda's memories related to him, that is why he skips past things he only vaguely senses; days and nights hiding from her own relatives, desperate and scared prey forced to share a home with predators. Glimpses of things, red flashes of hurt.

Then the memory is clear again, and he is _horrified_.

-

Hilda finds out about his mom and dad first, because she is the one who sees their bodies get taken out of the secret lab.

( Claude, seeing these memories, weeps; he had never seen the bodies, but now, through Hilda's eyes, he sees them, he gets one last glimpse of his family as corpses. Even after all this time, the wound hurts, his mother and father had loved him so much, he _misses _them so much...)

Whatever Rhea is doing- whatever strange thing she is trying to make happen, with these operations that leave her soaked with blood at their end- it seems to produce mostly corpses. Hilda was ordered to oversee the servants carrying them out; a punishment, they know she is scared of Rhea, that she hates the ugly things they do.

Normally, this would be someone else's job... someone who was an adult, not a child... but she had made her father angry, somehow, though she could not pinpoint what act of hers had offended. Perhaps it had merely been her presence; he had been drinking, after all, and unlike most men, drink did not dull his senses but sharpened them. He was _worse _when drunk, even more cruel, and more likely to hurt; and his eyes had fallen on her, last night.

So this unpleasantness became her burden.

The servants do what they can to gentle her burden. Hilda is the one Goneril who does not treat her servants as toys; alone of all her family, Hilda had lied for them, covered up mistakes, and the littlest lady of the house is loved by them for her kindness.

There is a reason little Hilda gets away with her nocturnal trips to the cells more often than not; those reasons are the servants in the kitchen and the hold proper, who see her little head of pink hair and do what they can for her, cover her tracks against her hunters. There is no servant who does not dream of killing their terrible lords, held back only by fear of them; but no one wants to hurt Hilda.

( Claude remembered when she'd taken the House for her own; she had given her brother to the maids, whom he had used, and cruelly. They had finished with him before the evening was up, and Holst would never hurt anyone again. He remembered how Hilda had told the story with relish... and how the Goneril servants, who were given their revenge against their masters, had served Hilda afterwards with all the faithfulness any lord could want.)

So the servants, who know that no child should see this, but who are helpless to do ought but serve, take care to throw sheets on the corpses when they can, as they deliver them to the processing room. Hilda is there to “oversee”, but that means nothing; it is just a punishment for her, and so they do not pester her with questions. They simply do the job, efficiently and quietly, taking them from Rhea's laboratory to the room located at the bottom of the Goneril fortress, lower and deeper than even the prison cells.

But they can't stop her from seeing the corpses, nor from the hurt it inflicts on her. The processing room ends up with ten corpses before it is full; she is there, when they pull the lever that activates the room's true function. Pumps hiss and grind, and then the fires start, heating water to boiling, water that would soon slump over these bodies. It was an endless cycle, done for hours; boiling the corpses, the water draining as it cooled, to be reheated and then dumped over them again, slowly rendering the flesh and fat into a slurry that could safely be dumped into the ocean, weakening the bones so that they could be crushed to dust later, leaving no evidence of their activities.

Some ancestor of hers had built the thing, back when he'd also decided to begin raiding in Almyra. This was the secret thing of the House, the open secret that everyone suspected but that no one talked about; the thing this room was built to hide. Slavery was profitable, for there were many rich folk of many lands who enjoyed the act of purchasing a living being, but it had been illegal in Fodlan since the time of Nemesis; back when Adrestia had spread across the entire continent like a blanket, one of the first laws Nemesis and Cethleann had hammered out was that no person had a right to own another.

Even as the Church had decided that those not directly related to Agartha were less human, exalting Fodlan's heritage over others, they had never said you had a right to _own _someone.

But money sings a siren song, and her ancestors had heard the call.

She is looking into that room, watching the water wash over the dead, when recognition hits her. She recognizes his father first; the king looks just like him, save that Khalid's face is a bit pointier than his father's, a little more edged. His mother she doesn't recognize, but she overhears talk of her among the servants, and realizes that she is the woman next to him, both their bodies mutilated as Rhea had torn them open, hunting their veins, trying to put something inside them.

Their eyes are open, their hair fluttering gently in the water that is destroying them, and she is suddenly so sick to her guts that she cannot _be _here. She turns to flee, something shattering inside her, tears in her eyes, and an old servant- a rarity, in a house so casually destructive of its toys, and doubly so, for his dark skin means he has Almyran blood- catches her, holds her, he gives her a hug. She cries in his arms, and he whispers soothing things into her hair.

“ It's bad, girlie,” he says to the scared child. “ But you can't leave. They'll hurt you. Just cry. It's okay. They're all busy elsewhere right now.”

She cries, desperate and hungry for that touch, burrowing into his wise arms. He smells of Almyran spices and sweat, and she digs her face into his chest, this child who should not be so familiar with the smell and sight of death. “ Awwad... there's a boy in the cells... those are his parents.”

( _Awwad_... Claude remembered seeing that name, on the one trip he'd taken to Goneril's fortress, in the wake of his ascension to Grand Duke; Hilda had carved it into their long wooden feast table, along with the names of everyone else she knew who had been one of her family's victims, the table a scroll of dishonors and atrocities that went on and on and on. He'd noticed Awwad's because it was Almyran, and near the top of the list.)

The kindly man simply held her a moment longer. “ He'll be next, then. She's been doing that- going down bloodlines until the whole family's dead.”

“ Oh, Goddess, _no_,” she said, but Awwad just held her tighter, as she broke in his arms, as some part of her went away and never came back.

“ Make your peace with him, child. Death's coming for him.”

She makes a decision, this child, who was never allowed to be a child, she makes a decision, and all her being reforms around it.

No.

_No_.

That night, she risks it, going down into the dark to warn him, and she brings him a full meal. It'll be easier if he's got some meat on his bones.

-

His powers try to force him to relive that moment, that horrible moment where she told him of his family; but no. Claude grabs them tight, and forces them away from it, he redirects his shadowed hands; that is one of his worst memories, and he will not see it again with Hilda's eyes.

Another memory is near, and he latches onto it, jumps down that hole so that he does not have to go down a deeper one.

-

Another memory, one he remembered, too; he got both sides of the memory, he knew this part of the play by heart.

Two months into the experiments- two months in which Khalid must put away his parents' deaths, two months in which he learns to hide his grief- Khalid leaned up against the bars of his cell, groaning, as Hilda rubbed vulnerary on his wounds.

“ Isn't this risky?” he asked. His breath hitched a little; he thought one of his ribs was broken. Rhea had gotten... _excited_ as he proved resilient, and her digging into his skin had grown careless in equal measure to her fervor. “ Vulnerary- that's... money. Somebody's gonna miss it, or notice I'm healing...”

“ Don't care,” Hilda said. She said it so matter-of-factly that he had to believe her; she spoke like her sentences were made of stone, like there was no way things _could _be any different from how she'd decided they were, and to Khalid, it was a great comfort. He had learned to lean on the older girl, to let her be his rock, down here in the dark, and she had not failed him yet.

( She never would, Claude thought proudly, watching from her eyes as her hands rubbed gentle healing poultice on his cuts. He would always have scars from the surgeries, but because of Hilda, they were smaller things, long and thin snaking white things on his dark skin, not the grotesque collection of brutalities he would have had without her intervention.)

“ Why?” Khalid asked. Why didn't she care? “ Aren't you afraid?”

She smiled at him, this boy, who was somehow more innocent than her, despite everything; more idealistic, at least. He had something in him she had been forcefully deprived of, something she had no name for, but found terribly impressive, the way fire looked to a moth.

( Hope, she would tell him years from this day. That was what had convinced her to follow him, come hell and high water; Claude, somehow, still had _hope_, and Hilda, whose hope had been stolen from her, would follow that star in him all her days.)

“ Every day,” she said. Except... except that wasn't true. Not anymore. Seeing his parents; seeing him... Something in Hilda had _broke_, and to her own surprise, it wasn't her mind.

No, she felt a sort of... unbreakable _courage _now, there was nothing she could not do, should she put her mind to it. Something in her had _broken_, but it was her _fear_, snapping like an overstressed timber from the pressure. She had lost her fear in Awwad's calming arms, and in the weight of her decision.

Khalid would live. She had decided it so.

“ Then... then why all this?” Khalid asked, still so surprised. He had been called half-breed often, even young as he was, and so this simple kindness was beyond his knowledge of strangers. People had been kind before, but only relatives.

“ They'll kill me, someday,” Hilda said, with a shrug. Simple truth. “ Any day now, really- one day, it'll be funnier to kill me than to hurt me, and... that'll be it.”

“ No,” Khalid said. He had just lost his parents, and could not comprehend losing Hilda too. “ No, they can't. You- you're _good_, you should... you should be able to live...”

She shook her head. “ I'm not free to do that,” she said, belatedly realizing she was talking to an _actual _prisoner. She snorted, but without amusement. “ I... I am not as bound as you are, but I'm not free either, Khalid.”

“ Why will they kill you?” he asked, concern in his eyes, grass-green under his newly-white hair.

“ Why do people like them do anything?” she answered, question for question. “ My family are monsters, Khalid.”

“ People should be better than this,” he said, and they are the first words he had spoken as a man, and not a child; some inkling of the man he will grow up to be, in this caged boy. “ There is no _reason _for this!”

Hilda nodded agreement, but said nothing, just kept putting aid to his wounds.

-

Here is a secret only two people know: Hilda is the reason Khalid survives.

The boy would have died, but that Hilda was there. Rhea was clumsy with human lives at the best of times, her contempt and disregard hard to mask when dealing with those close to her; the distant, benign holy woman, that was an act she could manage, but whenever she had to deal with people on a more personal scale, the true ugliness of her nature could not be disguised.

Khalid was just another experiment to her; it was not until later, when he lived and the others died, that she could be bothered to motivate herself to be less obviously terrible to him. He had little food and water, and the Goneril cells were not conducive to good health.

But Hilda brought him food and water enough that he was, while always hungry, in no danger of starving to death; and when an illness came upon him, a sickness born of the cold and damp that his body, weak from his injuries, could not fight off, she snuck, at great risk, a precious thing of Duscur to him, stolen from her family's apothecary. It was something one of Duscur's wise doctors had come up with, something that was supposed to be proof against many diseases, made- if you believed the tales- from mold fed on sugar, growing fat and big on cantaloupe skins. The potion had been mixed with precious elixir, bolstering the body even as the mold fought off whatever diseases inhabited the body, and it had cost a fortune to purchase something so powerful.

Her family, it turned out, had paid a fair price for the medicine; the green and sickly tasting liquid she brought him, which he'd barely been able to choke down, had worked. She gave him three doses, one a night, the way she'd seen the apothecary treat illnesses before; and her clumsy attempt at prescribing medicine was good enough. The first night, he did not improve- but the second, he breathed a little easier, and by the third, he was spitting up fluid from his lungs.

He would live.

( He remembered that; he always wondered how she'd acquired the medicine. His brave Hilda.)

She was never caught, though she had spent all the time worried she'd be caught, keeping the bottle in her room had been such a _risk... _the medicine had been expensive, an import, bought at great cost. This was no small handful of food or water, but something of value, something valued much more than Hilda's own life by the Goneril family, and the hunt was _relentless _for the thief.

She had not been afraid- no, that was gone, she would never be afraid again until long after the fortress of Goneril was a distant memory- but she had worried, for if she was caught, no one could bring medicine to Claude, and he would die.

A servant, eventually, was accused, when all leads turned up empty, Hilda having thrown the bottle out of a window into the ocean after it was empty. The servant so falsely accused had skin just a little darker than Fodlan norm, and thus, was easier for her kin to blame.

A servant her brother had... taken, and done things to, things the family had watched around the dinner table as a form of light entertainment.

Hilda had not puked or cried, having long since learnt that to react in such a way was to invite pain on herself, but it was a close thing, and in her room that night, she wept silent tears, sorry she had gotten that innocent person killed.

But the sacrifice pays well; Khalid lives, and his relatively better health is why, when the other subjects die, he is able- just barely- to make it through.

And the day comes that his cell doors open at last, and his tormentor takes him into the sunlight, to be her great pawn.

( But Khalid is no one's pawn, but a King; and this he will place in his memory, the beginning of his torments, that he owes Rhea, and someday soon, will pay back to her._)_

-

The next memory tugs at him, but he follows the strain of his own thoughts, for a time. It is one of his happiest memories, what he is about to recall, and with a small flexing of his strange new muscles, he is back in that moment.

It is a week after he is let out. Khalid has fallen all over himself to act as if he is grateful to the woman who murdered his parents, who tells him- clearly expecting he'll believe it- that his parents died holy deaths and that the Goddess chose to take them.

She did not. Be the Goddess real or not, divine hands did not take his family from him, but _Rhea's_, and he will never forget it.

But looking the monster in the face, aware that he is but a pawn- a valuable one, hard to replace, but a pawn still- he says nothing of his true thoughts. Everything he does, he does to convince her of his trust and faith and integrity, hopefully without being overly obvious about it- and it must work, she seems to assume he is one of hers.

This day, he is in her office. She had been briefing him on the coming days, and with that done, had no more further use for him; she has just been dismissed from her presence.

The schedule she laid out was simple enough. Soon they will return to Almyra, where Claude will take the throne, replacing his dead father- with Rhea as his regent, of course. Business must be attended to; some rebel prince in the East named Nader has been taking territory from Almyra, and he seems invincible, they already speak of him as a man who has never known defeat.

But for now, Khalid, whom she is convinced is one of her faithful fanatics, is free to do as he wishes in the meantime. All the House of Goneril is at his command, the monstrous folk merry in the presence of Rhea, sensing beastly kin of theirs.

Mostly Khalid retreats to his guest room, avoiding the beasts who hurt Hilda, who he has not seen since he was let out; but today, Khalid must do something else.

He owes a debt. A life for a life.

“ High Priestess,” Khalid- who in the future will give himself the name Claude so that the name his parents gave him will not be tainted with the terrible deeds he must do- spoke, and the great dragon-thing raised an eyebrow. “ One matter before I leave, if I may.”

“ Oh?”

“ I have a request to make. As I will be leading the Alliance in the future, I will need to know more about Fodlan. I would like to have a member of House Goneril, to serve as my retainer while we are in Almyra,” the young boy said. “ It will strengthen my understanding of Fodlan and the Alliance to have one of them as my servant over the next few years.”

“ Goneril is valuable to me,” the unholy one said. “ I'm not sure they can spare anyone.”

Claude bowed, down to his knees.

“ I would never seek to harm one of your interests, holiest one,” he said, this man- who should have been a King- with his forehead on the ground before this blasphemous beast, who lies to her in hope that, someday, he will be able to kill her for murdering his family. “ I ask not for their greater and more useful members, my lady. I request only that their least daughter, Hilda, who is of no value to the House as a whole, accompany me. It will relieve them of a burden and give me a boon that will help me serve you better.”

After a moment's deliberation, Rhea shrugged. “ That seems reasonable,” she said. “ Hilda's not doing particularly important work anyway; not like her parents or Holst. You may have her.”

_Thank you, _Khalid prayed in his mind, to whatever force had decided to grant him this favor. _Thank you_.

-

He let the dark carry him onward. He always had been curious how Hilda had felt at the news.

Later that day, Hilda was told she would be leaving the castle, to accompany Khalid as he navigated Almyran politics; she was even told that he'd requested her, specifically, and her family had laughed and claimed they owed him a favor for removing the little brat from their lives.

But Hilda knew the truth, and in the privacy of her own room, wept quiet tears of joy into her pillow. She was going to escape. She was going to be free. Even with her fear an emptiness inside her, this still tastes so sweet; no more must she suffer their attentions, no more must she wonder if she will make it to her teens before they kill her.

No, now... now she might be able to grow up, she might live to see the impossibly old age of twenty.

Khalid has saved her life.

And... and she can keep him safe. She's already risked so much. What will it hurt, to protect him a little more?

And he'll need it. Almyra was dangerous, she'd heard, a maze of draconic politics and warrior-culture posturing.

Compared to her family's casual cruelty, it sounded almost restful; she'd master it, soon enough. She couldn't _wait_ to dig in, to start exploring this new land, to figure out how best to protect Khalid.

He will probably try to set her free; that sounds like him. She has gotten to know him, over the months of his torture, and the greatest miracle of all is this: somehow he has that shining thing in him still. She cannot imagine how, but he has managed it- somehow all the harm he has suffered has not pummeled the greatness out of him. Not just yet.

If she can protect him, maybe never.

_-_

This was... there was more. All the years in Almyra, Hilda, who had grown up too fast, helping Khalid keep up, carrying him- sometimes literally. There had been an assassination attempt, four years later, and he had been knocked out; he survived only because Hilda had grabbed him and carried him bodily away from his attackers.

He had awarded her a medal for it, he remembered.

Other visions... her triumphant return home. He'd accompanied her, but she hadn't needed him; a berserk rage had gripped her tight, and she proved more than equal to the task of paying her family back all their evil.

She had killed them all; Claude had claimed to other Alliance officials that Hilda had merely imprisoned her family, but the truth was, unless Hilda had missed a few of her cousins, she was the last Goneril. The rest were corpses, disposed of with their own processing center- and how was _that _for sweet irony?

...Hilda, interestingly, did not seem to remember anything of that day, no matter that her own hands had done the deed for all but Holst, whom the maids had dealt with. Odd.

What else could he see?...

This was hypnotic... but... wait. With an effort, he roused himself out of Hilda's head.

How long had he been down here? What if Rhea came into his room, saw him- he had no idea how much _time _had passed-

Terror, sheer fear at endangering the plan, sent Claude skyrocketing back to his body, chasing that bright spark of fear. He opened his eyes, and saw that his room was painted in black- his shadow, it had grown, it encompassed the walls and the floor both.

He... he didn't feel hungry... he ran a hand over his beard, the white scruff rippling under his fingers. Didn't need a shave, but he _was _thirsty.

He glanced at the clock- probably should have done that first, he thought with some amusement- he had only been out... twenty minutes.

It had felt like... like forever, and no time at all, a timeless place, a state of bliss like that which followed good food or good sex.

( Well, he had to take Hilda's word for the latter. Claude was a virgin; the idea of having children with his Crest condition horrified him, and he had only ever wanted one person anyway, who would be forever out of reach.)

He shook his head to clear it, even as he relaxed the new muscles, let the darkness recede back into his shadow. He'd read that dark mages sometimes got... _lost_, but he'd never... he hadn't realized it was like that. Being inside her head- that connection... he could have ridden her memories forever.

He'd read that when humans died, their souls went into those they loved and hated most, blessings and curses... but with this... he wondered if the connection existed when you were alive, too. If you could reach out to those still living, if you were connected strongly enough to them.

An idea popped into his head, unbidden. Byleth was _made _of darkness, it should be _easier _to contact her... if Solon's notes were correct.

He... he _couldn't_, he _shouldn't_, but...

But he wants to see her again, before... before the end. He has no Hilda here, can't he have _something _for comfort?

He goes inside himself again, the shadow stretching. Just a moment. He will... just a moment.

He just wants to see her again.

If the connection was strong enough- she'd never liked him, the way he'd liked her, but she'd... she'd tolerated it, at least..

He tried to tug on that rope. He found his way easy enough; or at least, he thought he did. He chased the shadow of a woman, who was a woman-shaped shadow; he...

Somewhere near... Gronder, that is where he senses her, he senses her _sensing him, _she is at this very moment awakening to her true nature in a tent at Gronder Field.

Gronder. He sees it, in the scattered reflections of the dead, their shadows dissipating; they buffet his soul like a hurricane, but they tell him what he needs to know. The dead are mostly Alliance, the soul pieces he senses are mostly heading to locations in the Alliance. Not all; even in victory the winning army loses lives... but more, many more.

Thank the Goddess. Lorenz had pulled it off; Gronder is a Kingdom and Empire victory. He can see them, their shadows- Ingrid clearest of all, what _is _she? She is almost like Byleth- almost like him, now, he supposes- but different, feels colder, a grave chill that will never leave her.

But from Ingrid he turns to the Eagles- a storm of shadows on all of them. Of course. People have died in their name since the war began- died because of them, and died _for _them. A flight of Eagles surrounds the living ones, the spirits of all those who have died with their names on their lips, an army of the dead blessing them and pushing back on the scales of fate.

Edelgard, in particular, is the locus of so many souls- and isn't that ironic? The woman haunted by hallucinatory phantoms, protected by a host of real ghosts- so many, it is like looking at a hurricane. He sees- flashes- so many people, who send a piece of their soul to Edelgard, that they may aid her from beyond the veil. So many people, who believe in their Emperor.

( Is this the source of the Eagles' mysterious luck? So much is dependent on their great skill... but they are also just a little bit lucky, every now and then. Even the might of the Eagles must, at times, depend on a coin toss... but they do not fail them, when those times come, and he wonders how much of it is simply the force of all this _faith_ that is put in them. Perhaps it is just the collective will of all Adrestia that grants them the small luck their great talent needs to shine, that forces the spinning coin to land on its edge, an edge sharp enough to cut their own path in life.)

He can only see flashes of them- they are mostly faceless, just bits and pieces, only a few retain enough sense of self for an identity. A man who reminds him of Ferdinand, whose hands blaze with ghostly fire. A torn apart thing, in the shape of a man, with an axe in his shattered hands. An Agarthan woman, twin blades in her hands, who seems the most complete of the lot- who, he thinks, sees him, for a brief moment, before she rejoins the whirlwind around Edelgard, doing whatever it is the swirling ghosts are doing- pleading with fate, perhaps, or protecting her from the death curses of others.

This fascinates- but he doesn't have the right connection to them, he cannot see inside their skulls, he sees them only because he can see Byleth and sense them through her. Byleth...

Byleth. She is so beautiful. The ghosts surround her too- but there is something strange, her ghosts are on fire, her ghosts _blaze_. Holy light leaks out of them, and it is strange to be in their presence, this is light that does not shun the night but lets it in. This is the sun that accepts that night will follow, content that morning, too, will be; light that abides his presence.

The ghosts- he sees a face he almost knows, a woman, grown weary by war- a holy woman, who had been a Blue Lion, once upon a time... but then she is gone, and there is just Byleth, and all her holy ghosts, a light and radiance behind her head that is edged with shadow, a halo of gentle night.

He reaches out to her, again; could he... speak with her? He thinks he could, he thinks he could reach out to her, right now, and they could talk, they could speak, even as she is talking with Hubert, right now. He... he could...

He could _what?_ What would he say? He... he _can't_... they have to believe. Everyone has to believe, forever, that he is a monster. This doesn't end right if he doesn't die. He can't- no matter what- reveal anything to her, he...

He _can't_...

He withdraws, flees; but he has the oddest sense that _something _saw him go, something in Byleth that was not dark but light, something that opened one bleary, draconic eye the size of the sun and watched him leave.

Something, it would turn out, that did not forget what it had seen, in that glimpse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. You either skipped to the end or you plugged through it; congrats to both. 
> 
> Below, I detail what I think the take-aways are here, because I don't want people who don't like reading about things like this chapter to be so thrown off that they miss out. Separating it so that it won't be present for those who like to think about it with an air of mystery.
> 
> The important take-away here, for those who don't like the things this chapter involves; Gonerils were monsters, and are now all dead except Hilda, unless she missed a cousin somewhere. Hilda has been Claude's right hand since he was literally a child; they grew up together in Almyra after he was able to remove her from the Goneril household, which saved her life. She saved his life while he was being experimented on.
> 
> Dark magic relies heavily on memory, the past, and connection. Claude has great dark magic now, but he's still learning how to use it; he can't even lift paper with his magic yet. Edelgard, and all the Eagles, have a lot of ghosts around them, the remnants of human souls dedicating their deaths to their Emperor; the specific ghosts mentioned are Ferdinand von Aegir's dad, Randolph Bergliez, and Kronya around Edelgard, while Mercedes is one of Byleth's ghosts.


	9. ACT ii: The World Begins Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to less dramatic sorrows this time! Indech, Leonie, secrets, and a little bit of the Eagles and the Lions staring at some ashes on the ground- perfect!
> 
> Note that I'm having internet issues, so if something's off, tell me so I can fix it!

**Act II**

**In the Name of the Griffin**

**Chapter Two**

**The World Begins Again**

The sun's rays were just beginning to filter in through the dappled forest when Miklan finally found his tongue.

“ So let me get this straight,” said the scarred, ugly man to Indech. “ You're Indech, the actual Saint Indech, recorded in legends as Saint Cethleann's greatest warrior, and either her uncle or her father, depending. The big turtle guy.”

“ Yep,” Indech said. “ Uncle, by the way. Her father worked for Seiros.”

( The bastard. He'd owed Cethleann better.)

“ Okay. And... you're taking me and my troops to a village named Cethleann, which is where you have been since the War of Heroes ended, hiding in the northwest of Leceister all this time.”

Miklan's face seemed very calm, but his voice had the _lightest _edge of hysteria in it- and something else, almost a sort of... _amusement, _as if all this bullshit was some kind of _joke _whose punchline he was just waiting for. Indech fought down a few giggles at his dazed expression, managing only to give the man a big smile.

“ Not all of it,” Indech replied cheerfully. “ We used to be located near Lake Teutates- but human settlements came too close early in our history, so we moved out here about eight hundred years ago.”

“ Okay. Alright. So... so you're just gonna... you're just gonna drop the answer to one of the biggest mysteries in Fodlan right on me. You're just gonna come out and say ' Hey, we're Cethleann's lost Tribe, here's where the fuck we are.' That's- that's what we're doing.”

“ Yep,” Indech said, trying not to bust out giggling, smile growing bigger as Miklan shook his head.

“ Okay.” Miklan said, then started laughing. “ Okay, fuck, sure, why not. Diane. Diane! You heard all this too, right?”

He turned in his seat, to look at the slim archer behind him.

“ Yep, boss,” said the thin, scraggly-looking woman. “ I was here for all of it.”

“ So was I,” came the clear voice of Christophe, next to her. “ I... I must admit I am as surprised as you are, Miklan.”

“ We all are,” Gwendal said, from further behind,, the brutish older man hacking out a laugh. “ Shame this wasn't an ambush. I could have _understood _that. All this... Cethleann's tribe being alive... meeting Saint Indech... if I'd known I'd be in the presence of holiness, I'd have shined my armor better. I apologize for my rough appearance, Saint Indech.”

“ It's no matter. I never felt all that holy,” Indech admitted. “ My little niece was the saint in my family. I just went along with her when she did the right thing.”

Memories swam up inside him, unbidden, perfect with the clarity of the Nabatean memory; his little niece's face, resolute and proud, even as quiet tears rolled down her face, as she told him of her plan. He remembered hearing that voice like his mother's as she spoke, the voice that he, finally, _listened _to, that told him to go with her; the voice that had started speaking to him the day he met Nemesis. The day that a god-shattering bandit knelt before four dragons with their mother's bones in his hands, and offered himself up to die, if they would just simply _stop_; the voice like his mother's, that told him to _agree_.

( Of all Indech's many, many regrets, the old dragon regrets most that he did not know the words to say to convince Seiros to take up the offer.)

“ Holiness is just doing the right thing, over and over again,” Christophe said with a shrug. Gwendal snorted, as Indech chewed that over.

“ I like that,” the old berserker told the younger man. “ You should write a chivalric tale, you've got the words for it.”

“ It's my brother's fault,” Christophe demurred. “ He always had me read to him and my sisters, it gave me a taste for it.”

“ If we're going to be talking about fault, I should probably apologize to you two,” Miklan groused. “ You two haven't traveled with me before, but I'm probably the reason this has happened. I live an interesting life, which I think is an ancient curse from Dagda?”

Diane laughed. “ It is, and yeah... he's not kidding, you two. Boss, you're the only man in the world who would find Cethleann's lost tribe by _accident_.”

“ Isn't that the truth of it?” Miklan said, shaking his head. “ Goddess, I feel like I'm half a Black Eagle myself, all the weirdest crap happens to me. Every time Ladislava tells me some new story of the Eagles, I can come up with something just as weird. Can't go for a piss without stumbling on something odd.”

“ Isn't that how you met that Leceister poacher?” Diane asked.

“ Yes,” Miklan said with exasperation. “ I tell you, there are few things you want to see less when you've got your dick in your hands then an arrow aimed at your bits.”

“ That worked out, though. Lyle was a good man to have around. He still your game warden back in Gautier lands?”

“ Yeah,” Miklan said. “ I still think he didn't have to be so dramatic when we first met, he could have aimed at my head or something. I'd have taken it much less personally.”

“ It's just rude to attack a man while he's pissing,” Gwendal said. “ Not to mention how hard it is to fight with your nuts flopping around. I hate fighting naked.”

“ Wait, you've fought naked?” Miklan said, immediately trying not to think about the mental image that conjured. “ What the hell happened?”

“ If taking a piss is a bad time to be attacked, in the middle of entertaining yourself with a prostitute is the worst,” Gwendal said. “ Assassins, both times.”

“ ..._Both?_” Christophe said hesitantly, and Gwendal nodded.

“ You'd think I'd have learned after the first time, but I was _very _dumb in my youth, and the lady was _gorgeous_, and I had coin to spare. She gave me a refund, which was very nice of her.”

Diane cracked up. “ Boss, I think he'd fit into the Forgotten just fine!”

“ You attract a lot of real characters to you, don't you?” Indech said having smiled through all this strange conversation. Fun traveling companions, these Faerghi would make! It reminded him a little of the Elites, of traveling with Nemesis; while Indech had never fully known what to think of the man, he had to admit that the once-bandit had a strange charisma to him, a sort of intensity that drew the strange and the powerful to his side in droves.

“ Yes, somehow,” Miklan answered, putting a hand to his forehead. “ Don't know why, though.”

“ It's because you're a good man, but unlike too many good men, you go out into the world instead of hiding yourself away,” Christophe said serenely from behind him. “ There are many who want to be good, but must be lead; it is not a surprise that they would find you and follow you, so that you can lead them to greatness.”

No one really knew what to say in the face of that... proclamation, except Diane, who quirked an eyebrow at Christophe before she spoke quietly to Miklan, whose hand dropped from his face after scratching at his own scar, going back to his reins.

“ Shit, he'd fit in too, boss, he's weird as hell.”

They continued in silence for a while after that, just riding down the trail. Indech's left side ached, where his great scar- a souvenir of his last battle with Seiros, the battle that had killed Cethleann- sat heavy and tight, pulled uncomfortably by the motions of riding.

He scratched idly at the old wound under his chainmail.

( He could have slept, let it heal... but there had been too much to do. Far too much to do, until it was too late, the wound too old to be restored by sleep... but he'd never regretted the choice. A little pain meant nothing, if he could uphold the duty he had inherited from his niece.)

The diplomatic meeting in Ailell had been cut somewhat short by Indech revealing his true self, which had convinced the Faerghus party to come along with them. Indech was just glad the Church got his forms right; he'd seen what they'd made of his niece, and while he got _why _they presented her as older, more of a grandmother figure, it was still wrong.

Then they'd all taken off to Cethleann, the Faerghi uncomfortable but a bit too dumb-struck to do anything but follow along the trail. Indech had figured that was how it would go, based on experience; most people reacted to the revelation of the Tribe's existence like they'd just taken a sledgehammer to the skull.

In time, Miklan finally broke the silence again.

“ I mean, this is lovely country,” he said, waving his arm around them as they traveled. He told the truth; with Ailell's molten magma falling behind them and the sun just now beginning to rise in the morning, it was easy to see a land heavy and lush with bounties of pine and deciduous trees, a land rendered heavy and fertile with the good ash of the volcanic land to its west. Summer was upon them, and the world strutted its stuff; flowers were in full bloom, a riot of reds and whites amidst the deep green of old forest growth, while birds sang their endless ballads of love and war, attracting mates and taunting rivals in the same breath.

Daring animals got close to the caravan, trusting its presence to drive off predators; big stags with their horns growing in for the mating season, rabbits darting up near the warhorses, squirrels running on the branches above their heads, the never-ending riot of the forest's life. The area had good hunting, and Indech had been careful for them to limit their predation as much as possible, so the area could be preserved into the future; Nabatea did not have the luxury of humans, to think only of the short-term.

The diplomatic party was riding up a small trail, heading towards Cethleann. The trail they rode up was a small one, little used, and the vast party moving down it was almost assuredly the biggest group that had ever been on it; they were taking it two at a time, but it was almost too much for this path, which was barely more than a wide deer track. Indech's horse snorted at the closeness; he patted her on the neck. This horse was Biscuit Five, because Indech had run out of good horse names three centuries ago, and was doing his best. The trees pressed closer on the path up ahead, and the pegasus scouts of Faerghus were unable to fly through the dense cover; instead, they flew more or less directly above them, a flying column to match the one beneath them.

( All the ground troops, be they manaketes of Cethleann's tribe or Faerghus knights, shared the same unifying prayer in their head- _Goddess, please don't let a pegasus shit on me._)

“ Lovely country,” Miklan repeated, glancing around. “ Ain't home, but it's sure lovely. If I wanted to get away from people I'd come out here too.”

He turned back to Indech, face grim and serious. “ Still... how come you guys have been avoiding us? Humans in general, I mean. Been a couple times in history a few dragons would be pretty helpful. Faerghus' rebellion would sure as shit have been easier with a dragon or two. Or, you know, _right now, _when Rhea and _her _dragons sure as hell don't have any compulsions about attacking us. Can't pretend I'm not sore with you for being a no-show.”

“ Your anger is a fair thing,” Indech admitted, smile fading. “ I won't pretend it isn't. But... let me tell you our history, and you can figure out why we've been avoiding you. How much do you know of us?”

“ The basics,” Miklan admitted. “ You guys fought alongside Nemesis while Cethleann was alive, then she died and your tribe disappeared. Church says you guys retreated from the world of humans.”

Indech nodded. “ That's close. But to give you the short answer... after Cethleann died, and Nemesis disappeared, things started getting... bad... between us and humanity. It didn't help that Nemesis had a lot of kids, and about half of them wanted the throne for themselves. They were all hunting for an edge over the others; all of them approached us at one time or another, wanting our support.”

“ So what'd you do?” Miklan asked.

“ I tried to keep us out of it. Wrong decision, in hindsight; I should have thrown our weight behind whichever candidate seemed most likely to maintain the peace between races... but I was busy grieving Cethleann and Nemesis both at the time, and it seemed the most respectful path, to choose neutrality in human political affairs.”

“ Which means,” Miklan interrupted, “ that when push came to shove, _because _you tried to stay out of it, you got dragged in, but in the worst way possible. Every group was afraid you'd step in and back up their enemies; and because you weren't on their side, you made a convenient target for demonization; they could whip up their supporters into a frenzy, claiming you were behind their setbacks, and it didn't cost them anything, because you weren't backing them anyway. Bet it was almost a contest, making up conspiracy theories about your people, claiming you were secretly supporting one faction or another behind the scenes.”

Indech nodded, face grim. “ You've a fine political mind,” he replied. “ I usually have to explain that part.”

Miklan shook his head. “ My dad got a lot of things wrong,” he said. “ One thing he didn't was politics. I hate the whole thing- I'm more honest, and less of a bastard- but I get how it works.”

“ Sounds about right,” Gwendal said with a sigh. “ For what it's worth, Saint Indech... I apologize, on behalf of humanity. We tend to grow stupid in large groups, but that is no excuse.”

Miklan turned to look at the man, almost expecting a joke, but the elder knight's tone had been entirely serious, and his face was set into grim distaste. He'd meant the apology.

Miklan turned back around. Hmm. He wouldn't have expected that from Gwendal... but then again, a person was a complicated thing. If his leadership of the Forgotten had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that.

“ I thank you,” Indech said to Gwendal. “ But no apology is needed on your part. Some of the problem was mine; Cethleann might have proven smarter at that work than I did. She was always good at the talking part. With her gone, it fell on my shoulders... and I failed.”

He'd done his best, but... he just wasn't able to bridge the gap, not the way Cethleann could. Maybe it was just because, somewhere inside, he was still a little... shy. He would always prefer retreat to advance, defense to offense... be that in social or military matters. Cethleann had been the brave one, between the two of them, along with all the other great things she had been.

“ Eh, might not have been much you could have done,” Miklan said. “ Civil wars are fucking nasty. Didn't Nemesis pick a successor?”

“ He did,” Indech said. “ But she died of an accident- and before you ask, I've always wondered how accidental it was, too.”

“ Of fucking course,” Miklan said. “ Thousand years ago, and it's the same shit as today, huh?”

“ There is nothing new under the sun,” Christophe said, quoting the Church's holy writ. “ There are only variations of the old.”

Everyone nodded along to that. Not everything the Church had written was true, but that one felt right enough.

“ So, civil war's about to break out, and your people were going to get hammered by every side involved, that about the shape of it?” Miklan said.

Indech nodded. “ If Cethleann or Nemesis had lived- or better, if _both_ had been there- we could have avoided so much... but they were gone, and what happened is this. Once things began to reach the point of possible violence, when the rhetoric became intolerable, I approached the ruling regent- that would be Vestra, who was doing his _best _to hold the whole thing together, and failing- and told him that we would withdraw from human habitation, retreat and lick our wounds.”

“ I feared that we would be caught in the infighting and destroyed; we were powerful individually, but we would be fighting literally every human on the continent. Vestra signed off on it, and so we faded from your histories to rebuild.”

And how weird that had been. Before the war, before his mother's death, he'd been part of Seiros' faction, which had wanted to flee and establish a land of dragons and dragons alone; Indech had been the only one who wasn't a true believer among them, because he'd always liked humans, and had never had the jealousy of Seiros or Macuil's dismissal or even Cichol's sheer indifference.

He'd joined up because, well, his three best friends were going, and in his own way, he thought maybe they needed him for a balance; Macuil and Seiros were always gung-ho, and while Cichol had been the smartest of the four, he'd also been more of a follower. Indech could be a voice of reason on their council, keep their new nation on track.

But when the war ended, it had been Indech, alone of all of them, who had in fact established a land for dragons and dragons alone. If there were Gods in the universe besides his own poor mother, they _had _to be laughing- hell, even Indech thought it was funny, on occasion.

“ Okay, so that explains why you left in the first place,” Miklan said. “ But why the no-show for a thousand years?”

“ The truth's a lot simpler and more disappointing than you're hoping for,” Indech said. This was a conversation he'd had several times, and the answer had always disappointed. “ Beyond the simple fact that our lifespans mean a thousand years is just a lot less _time _than it is to you... we are isolated up here, by choice. Until three years ago, we hadn't known _anything_ about what was going on in the world outside. We had no idea she was back.”

“ And when you learned?” Miklan said.

“ We've been preparing,” Indech said. “ We are not the only force that's been rebuilding in secret.”

“ How'd that go?” Miklan asked. “ The rebuilding. How many dragons we talking here?”

“ You'll see,” Indech said with a grin. “ More than dragons, too.”

“ Oh, yeah,” Miklan said with a snort. “ Forgot the rest of the crazy shit you told us.”

“ I mean, 'hey, Cethleann's tribe is right here, and I'm Saint Indech, how's it going' is a lot to take in,” Diane said.

“ It really is,” Christophe said. “ But there's more.”

“ This is the part I find really unbelievable,” Gwendal admitted. “ Lady Daphnel was executed, yet she rides right down to meet with us; and not only that, she has a Golden Deer with her, one of the Grand Duke of Dragon's pet beasts.”

“ Golden Deer no longer,” Indech said, looking ahead, leaning to see around the manaketes ahead of him to see the group's leadership. Leonie and Judith were riding at the column's front, Judith having wanted to reserve any talk for a more formal setting and Leonie working as her bodyguard; Indech had stayed behind to talk to their guests. “ Leonie... we owe everything to her. She was the one who came to us and told us of Seiros' return.”

“ Yeah, let's... let's table that last part for now,” Miklan said. “ Don't want to think about what that means.”

“ It means this is the Second War of Heroes,” Gwendal said eagerly, his eyes glinting with fervor. “ It means these are days of wonder and legend. I cannot _wait _to fight Seiros.”

“ All in good time, Gwendal,” Miklan said. “ So... Leonie. You were isolated, so you might not know this, but Claude von Riegan's a genius, and maybe letting one of his Golden Deer into your village was a bad idea? Just suggesting.”

“ If it were not for Leonie, we would not even know the war was going on,” Indech said patiently, reminding himself not to be irritated. It was a fair question... but Leonie had become so important to the village over the past three years that it seemed absurd to mistrust her. “ She did not come here under orders from Claude, but fleeing him, seeking to redeem herself for her service to Seiros. She came here with nothing more than the clothes on her back and her infant son in her arms, and almost solely by her efforts alone has our army come into being.”

The trail began to broaden, winding down a long, low hillside, a wide creek burbling merrily next to it, and eventually crossing it at the bottom of the hill, where it widened even further into a proper river, joined by other streams. The press of trees eased, and the pegasi spread out, to the intense relief of the marching soldiers below. A long, low bridge passed over the deceptively deep river, carved out over long years by draconic hands, providing a place where a water-breathing creature might hide for a long time without revealing their presence.

Just that happened as the caravan's head reached, a seadragon revealing himself from out of the water, rising up slowly next to the bridge so as not to spook their guests- though given that these men and women had spent five years fighting dragons, they paused and tensed, hands flying to their weapons.

“ Leonie,” the seadragon said, focusing on her in the front, innate magic translating thoughts to words for a creature whose mouth was designed for predation and not pronunciation. “ Everything going well?”

“ Steady, soldiers,” Miklan said at the same time, hoping to defuse the sudden tension in the air. “ Saint Indech, is he one of yours?”

“ Yes,” the saint replied. “ He is Lambton, one of our village's guards. We are near; but you are in no danger from him.”

The dragon in question wasn't paying any attention to that conversation, wrapped up in his own talk with Leonie. Indech shook his head. To be that young again... he was one of the village's youngest, and had been chosen to be a guard out here on the safest trail mostly to get him out of the way. He'd taken to it with unusual gusto- they all figured he'd be bored in a week, but it was a year in and he was still enthusiastic about his task. Weird kid, but maybe worth something- if a bit oblivious.

Still, the Faerghi were loyal to their commander, and the dragon was just chatting, not trying to attack anyone, so the atmosphere of fear and possible violence dissipated... though they still gave him odd looks. Lambton was ferociously ugly, resembling creatures that had never been this close to the surface world, and his wide, unblinking black eyes and long rows of teeth, topped with a small gleaming orb that leaned over his face from a long, fleshy tendril, were unnerving, to say the least, alongside his slimy brown skin.

( Privately, Indech was grateful that, of the waterborn dragons among the village, none of them really resembled Cethleann, drawing their attributes from other sea creatures instead; a living reminder of her would have ached more than the wound in his side.)

Eventually, the young man- as dragons accounted things- noticed the soldiers.

“ Oh, sorry, sorry! Didn't mean to spook anyone,” the youngster burbled, voice swift and slick like oil and runny eggs, only a few months past his third century and still full of the excitableness of youth. “ Sorry if I scared anyone, I just had to check with Leonie to make sure everyone's who they're supposed to be.”

“ We talked before we left,” that self-same archer said, loud enough for others to hear. “ You just wanted to see the newcomers.”

“ You got me there,” he said, chuckling. “ Anyway, now that I have, I'm going back into the water. Sorry for bothering you!”

He sank back into the river, and not a few Faerghi were clearly trying to work out how the entire long dragon was fitting in what appeared to be a small river. As the caravan started moving again, more than a few of the knights looked in the river, trying to find the dragon, but Indech was proud of the lad's discipline; he stayed invisible at the bottom, the only evidence he was there the dim, hypnotic glow of his angler, down in the depths.

Miklan was clearly wanting to ask questions about Lambton, but as they crossed his bridge, he, with visible effort, returned to the subject they'd been discussing instead.

“ Your army... how many troops does Judith have?”

“ We'll talk exact numbers later,” Indech said, “ but the last free army of Leceister is bigger than you'd think.”

A bit of a lie- the last free army was actually quite small, consisting of Daphnel's forces augmented with the remnants of those Houses that had fought Rhea's takeover. Leonie had gathered them over the years, using her mercenary company to sneak them back to Cethleann, but it was a small number, all told.

Still, they had a balancing factor, and Indech couldn't _wait _for their guests to see it.

“ And Leonie pulled all this together,” Miklan mused. “ Are we _sure _she's not just gathering all the resistance to Claude in one place? Make it easier to smash all at once.”

“ Seiros would never abide us,” Indech said. “ She hated us so much- even more than she hated you humans. After all, we _betrayed _her, and given her sense of entitlement... well. She would never be able to contain her anger if she knew where we were; we'd be under attack the second she found out about it. Claude is her creature; if he knew, he'd tell her. Leonie has done too much to help us- if it _was _a betrayal, it passed the point of being easy long ago. We're harder to hurt now than we've ever been; it just doesn't make sense for this to be a trick.”

Miklan snorted. “ I hope so,” he said. “ Goddess knows Claude's fucked me over once or twice. The Deer are just as bad as their leader. I keep getting stuck fighting this little blonde prick- name's Ignatz- he's frightening as hell. I've never seen him miss. You wouldn't think that was possible... but he's not only a hell of an archer, but he's _smart. _Lost a lot of soldiers to an avalanche, of all fucking things; they'd done something, set up some plan. Don't know how they even knew we were going to use that pass. We get halfway down it, I hear a fucking _whistle_\- little bastard, he _wanted _me to know he was there- I look over, and there he is.”

“ And after he made _sure _I saw him, then he fired a burning arrow from a ballista at something above us, something that exploded and sent tons of snow and ice barreling down on my men.”

“ Worst day we ever had,” Diane said, face gloomy. “ Still... remember the screamin'.”

“ It missed most of us, but it caught the tail end of our group. Lot of good people died that day, people that had been with me from the start. If he'd attacked any earlier, he'd have got me, too. At least the Alliance had to clear the fucking snow off the trail before they could attack us, gave us time to prepare... but we never even got to bury the bodies, the snow buried them first. Couldn't hold a proper funeral for any of them.”

He shook his head. “ So you can imagine why I'm hesitant to trust a Deer, even one who seems to have turned over a new leaf.”

“ Trust me,” Indech said. “ Leonie came to us, and convinced us to fight; she will prove her worth to you.”

“ Let's hope,” Miklan said, still directing a cautious glance at the orange-haired woman in the front.

More silence, as they started up the last hill, just the quiet murmur of the caravan around them and the birds in the forest until Miklan yet again broke the silence.

“ Okay, so... that last thing. Archbishop Rhea is... Seiros.”

“ Yes.”

“ Is she _really _the Goddess' firstborn daughter?”

More memories, perfectly clear- sometimes the Nabatean mind was a curse, though Indech knew that his mother had not intended it that way. Seiros, in her youth, standing beside him, telling him proudly that she was his big sister; Seiros, bandaging up her younger siblings, or encouraging them, or- her favorite task- admonishing them, a little drill sergeant for her mother in corralling the kids into some kind of order. He still remembered her little voice going _I'm the firstborn, you have to listen to me!_

( Maybe that was the problem, at day's end; that Seiros had loved commanding the others and had always been so very conscious of her position in the hierarchy, so very aware that she was above them. Maybe that was the first sign of what she would become; or maybe he was reading too much into his childhood, putting too much weight on the Seiros he had known, and not the Seiros she would become.)

“ Yes,” Indech said.

“... Shit. So the Goddess was real after all,” Miklan said. “ There goes my atheism. Fuck.”

Indech chuckled.

“ If it helps,” he replied,“ my mother always liked human atheists. She said skepticism was a good trait, and to be nurtured.”

Miklan nodded. “ That's a weird thing for a Goddess to say,” he said, then scratched his scar. “ What... what was she like?”

A question so many of the newcomers asked; all these modern-day humans had grown up worshiping Indech's mother in a Church that covered the continent, so of course they were curious about her. Judith had asked it; so had Emile, Leonie's right hand, and many of the soldiers in the army.

( Leonie had never asked; Indech wondered about that, sometimes.)

But even though the question was an eminently reasonable one, and despite how often they asked it, Indech found that it had never gotten any easier to... explain. You'd think it would be- it wasn't like he didn't perfectly remember every time he'd ever answered it, but... well, each time he was asked, he ended up saying something a little different. Never a lie, and he didn't ever quite mean to do it that way, it was just... hard, to summarize a whole person.

Harder to summarize a person like his mother; what to focus on? His first memories of her, when he hatched newborn and hungry and _angry _from his egg, because Indech had been the world's pissiest baby?

( Sothis, smiling down at him, her face full of delight, even as he mewed, hungry, her strong hands picking him up gently by his then-soft shell. _Hello, little one_, she'd said, and her eyes were full of love. _I'm your mama. _In reply, he'd tried to bite her nose; again, he'd been a cranky baby.)

Or how... sad she was, inside, for reasons he'd never been able to parse. Even when things were going well, there was a sort of desperate unhappiness in his mother, just under the skin, and he _got _that, even as a child, he _understood_, because he was shy-natured in his youth and no matter how much he loved the company of his siblings, he sometimes just had to run off and be alone, for a while, hiding at the bottom of deep lakes and breathing deep of the solitude.

( It was why he'd made himself funny. Indech was the only one of Sothis' children who ever actually _understood _her, who saw the great despair inside, and he had always thought it was unjust, that the woman who brought her children such happiness should be sad; and so, with titanic effort, he had went from being her shy child to being her funny kid, and he only hoped that his antics had lifted her mood once or twice.)

...But those were all complicated things to say, and they were near the village, so he told Miklan the simplest truth about Sothis.

( How she was always there, how she understood all of her kids, how much joy she took just from seeing them grow and learn, the _love _in her eyes, be she talking of her Nabatean creations or the adopted spirit of humanity.)

“ She was a good mother,” he said.

Miklan stopped scratching his scar, and nodded his head.

“ Not a bad thing for a Goddess to be,” he said, with something odd in his voice- something almost wistful. “ Lot of worse things to be.”

Then they crossed a ridge, and the village was laid out below them, and Miklan had nothing more to say.

-

Eventually, everything ends, both sorrows and delights; and the day waited for no one.

“ We need to leave,” Dorothea whispered into her ear, her breath tickling her flesh and making Edelgard's body do all _kinds _of things it had never done before. “ Need to meet with the Lions at Lorenz's tent.”

“ Okay,” Edelgard said, and with one last kiss, rose up, Dorothea still in her arms. “ Okay.”

She smiled at her, shyly, her face a warm and bright thing. Dorothea, amused, kissed her on the nose, and Edelgard feared her blush would set fire.

But then Dorothea truly arose, and Edelgard got up, too, from this... overfluffed beast. What kind of bed was this? Edelgard vaguely recalled people gifting Dorothea pillows, over the years, a competition she'd barely noticed- she'd barely noticed _anything_ in the ashes... apparently, this is where all those pillows were sacrificed, to summon this... lumpy beast of a bed.

“ What will we be discussing with the Kingdom?” Edelgard asked.

“ Ashe sent a message over about there being something... off, with Lorenz' tent and the supplies. Hubert confirmed that it's kind of odd, and gave me the details- the supplies... they're... the supply caravan is off. I'll tell you more once I come back.”

Edelgard nodded. “ And after that- I'm sure you've already thought of this, but I've been thinking since I woke back up, and- we need to formalize an alliance with the Kingdom.”

“ I have thought of that,” Dorothea said with a smile. “ Here- while I'm at the meeting with Felix and Ashe, read over this.”

She pulled out a drawer, and placed a notebook before Edelgard, on which was written _The Griffin Federation_. Small tabs of paper stuck out at the side, marking pages within the notebook, each labeled in Dorothea's neat, tight handwriting- _Faerghus and Duscur, Cethleann's Tribe, Economic Union, Military Aid_, _Church Restoration, Alliance and Almyra._

One tab that drew the eye the most- _Brigid._

“ Learn it,” Dorothea said. “ You've saved Dimitri's life twice now- maybe he'll listen to you. Coming from me, it's one thing... but I think he might hear you out.”

Edelgard nodded. “ I'll make myself ready.”

Dorothea gave her a quick kiss for that, then the taller woman unruffled her clothes and freshened up for a moment before leaving her lover to her work, Edelgard sitting down at her lover's small desk to read over the plans.

-

They stood atop the hill, and all Cethleann was laid out below them.

Calling Cethleann a “village” a few decades ago would have stretched the word's meaning; now, it had broken loose from those bonds entirely. The village itself was more properly a small town, laid out below them in a valley that sank deep down out of sight of the surrounding foothills. Overseeing the entire community was a statue of Cethleann that Indech had carved himself out of an entire cliffside, a combination of tomb and memorial and temple that had taken him long decades to make.

( Nabatea did not die, until the day Sothis did, and then they died in such droves that they had no time to learn how to mourn in their own way; as in so many things, the Children of the Goddess had to turn to older Humanity, and from the elder race learn ways of coping.)

The great leviathan of her dragonself curled around her human shape, and both her bodies watched over the Tribe she had once formed. That cliff had watched as a few scattered survivors had turned into many; birth was difficult for the Nabatea, a long process, but a thousand years was not a small amount of time even to a dragon. They had been blessed to be fruitful, and so they had multiplied; it helped that they remembered Cethleann's healing arts, that they had maintained the great gift a human woman had once passed on to their leader. In teaching Cethleann, Flayn had saved generations; the tribe kept to her old arts, and it made the difficult process of birth easier.

Their homes lay all around the lake- which they'd named after him, to Indech's embarassment- in a great curving sweep, following the round shore. The houses closest to the beach were small, human-sized, for the Nabateans who preferred that body; as they moved out, they grew bigger, more cavernous, most being little more than gateways into actual, dug-out caverns. Few of Cethleann's people spent all their time as great dragons- if nothing else, it was an incredible strain on food resources- but those who did needed the room.

Past the largest houses were the wide farming fields, fed by the great river that came out of the western foothills, descending from the last mountains of eastern Faerghus to flow here to this once-nameless lake. The farms grew a variety of crops, or supported the ever-present swarms of chickens that were _everywhere, _along with a considerable number of cows, moving about in fields left fallow and rotated yearly.

( Eggs and milk- easy and renewable sources of protein, very necessary for some species of the Nabatea, who were practically obligate carnivores. Nemesis' idea, when they'd been trying to figure out how their two species could coexist without a Goddess to mediate between them, the bandit king approaching each problem with a straightforwardness so relentless it was almost clever.)

The river, which they'd never bothered to name, wound past these places until it eventually crossed beneath the carved cliff before plunging into the lake, with Cethleann's human hands forming a bridge over it; he'd been particularly proud of _that _achievement, he'd had to invent a kind of rocky paste to get that to stay, and he'd managed it despite being a Nabatean.

He was proud, too, of this village. He had failed to protect Cethleann, but he thought he had not led her Tribe so poorly in the aftermath; from their few scattered survivors and a handful of stragglers of Seiros' army, who had come to them when all things were done, had come this great gathering of his people, larger than any of the great generations his mother had created. A hard thing- so many had almost given up to despair, early on, suicide ever-present. Those who had held it together only with the adrenaline of combat and who, bereft of war, could not face the grief inside them, had been the worst, too often victims of their own hands.

But he'd managed it.

( At least inbreeding wasn't a problem, as long as they kept it to cousins at worst- easier than one might suspect, since small as the initial group had been, none of them were related to each other. A minor blessing. It helped that his mother had made her children resilient against such corruption in their blood, a precaution given their small numbers. Of course, she'd also assumed she'd have time to make more of them... even the divine couldn't predict the future perfectly.)

Villagers milled about, mostly as humans, the sea-green in everyone's hair; a few of the oldest were fishing, but most of those that could be seen were out in the fields, working, weeding longs rows of vegetables and grains, tending to the animals, or maintaining the small orchard they'd finally managed to get started in the farthest reaches of the fields.

But the town, impressive as it was, did not draw the eye of their visitors first.

No, most were staring at the far shore of the lake, where, despite the distance, they could clearly see a dragon being outfitted in armor. She was a grim dragon, broad and low like a toad, eyes small and clever things atop a too-small cranium. Her front legs were her wings, too, great curling bat things, and her wide, sharp-toothed mouth ended in two great jutting tusks that curved like scythes, their discolored white a contrast to her black and gray scales.

A great system of cranes and pulleys was all around her, the makeshift dock by which their human allies applied the great plate of armor in a mimicry of how they'd once built battleships. This was a test run, checking to see if everything worked; some more tightening of the chains and buckles that kept the pieces on, and then the humans and their machines slipped away, to let her try it out.

She took a few heavy steps, grunted, said something in the low, terrifying bass of her species, a growling sound like an executioner's axe wet impact. She took a few steps back, and up came the humans and their devices again, making adjustments based on the dragon's words.

More than just the armoring was going on, though Indech was glad Leonie had thought to set that up, give their visitors a spectacle to watch; first impressions mattered, and given Miklan's literal jaw drop, it was clear this was making _quite _an impression. All around the dragon being suited up was the last free army of Leceister, the one piece of the Alliance that had, so far, escaped Rhea's clutches.

Even at this distance, you could see and hear much of what was going on over there, sounds carrying well across the lake. The war industry, three years old now, resounded; the high whine of saws slicing through trees, the ever-present sound of hammering as timbers were connected into siege engines and metal was beaten into shape, the hiss of tannery acids as hides were transformed into leather for boots and gloves, the sizzle of cooking for hungry workers.

But Indech's eyes were drawn to the sights, in particular, the flags that flew over the great golden camp. They flew high and free, though none were _quite _the same flag they had once been.

Oh, it was still gold and brown, and still divided into sections, but these were new sections, and only two this time, divided vertically down the middle. On the left was the symbol of House Daphnel, with the House symbols of every minor House that had joined her cause surrounding it in a circle.

On the other half was Cethleann's crest. The new Alliance would not be human alone, though Indech had not been entirely happy with the idea. They had been safe here, after all, and that was the task he had taken up in Cethleann's name, the safeguarding of her people...

But, after consideration- and a vote of every adult in the village, this had been too big a decision for Indech to make alone- the village had agreed that it was time to re-enter the world. Seiros' return alone meant many of the oldest, those original survivors, would vote that way so they could fight her; the ancient battle remained unfinished. The younger ones wanted to see the world; only the naturally cautious, like Indech himself, voted against it.

He had voted against it because he felt he _should_, that his job was to safeguard Cethleann's survivors; but he had bowed to the group's will. Most wanted to go. Maybe it was time... they could not stay here forever. It was incredible they'd managed to stay hidden _this _long... and they weren't _that _hidden, hell, they paid taxes. Technically, they were on the map, if only very specific maps of this particular area, kept only at Garreg Mach.

Admittedly, they paid taxes through a complicated scheme he'd set up centuries ago with the Church that involved sending the shipments to a local baron. The current one had never questioned the weird religious community at the outskirts of her territory, so long as her payments arrived on time; then the war had come, she had died fighting for Daphnel, and that was that.

All this flickered through Indech's head in the time it took Miklan's jaw to close, after it had fallen open at the sight of a dragon armored like a knight for battle.

“ That's- that's a dragon in full plate,” he said, perfectly calmly.

“ Yes,” Indech said, smiling at the human's clear stupefaction. Gwendal started laughing, big deep guffaws.

“ That's brilliant!” the old berserker declared. “ I love it!”

Christophe just shook his head. “ Oh my.”

“ Holy shit,” Diane said from behind Miklan. “ Goddess, I hope the Alliance doesn't start doing that with its dragons- err, well, shit, I guess that _is _the Alliance over there, too. Well, this is going to get confusing.”

“ Yeah,” Miklan said, slowly shaking his head. “ But still... dragon in full plate. Thank the Goddess Rhea's never thought of that- though why in the world she hasn't, I can't imagine.”

“ She hates humans,” Indech said with a shrug. “ It wouldn't occur to her until someone else did it; I doubt she thinks humans have anything to add to dragons. She'd have to be horribly frustrated to even ask a human for help, much less accept it.”

( Miles away, Rhea watched as Cyril's experiments began to show promise, with a terrible smile on her face.)

“ So, err, hell, I'm holding us up,” Miklan said, and prodded his horse forward again. “ Hm. Well. My report to my King is going to be... so much longer than I thought it was going to be.”

“ I imagine so,” Indech said, still grinning.

“ You're enjoying the shit out of this, aren't you?” Miklan said, and Indech nodded cheerfully.

“ It's one of my greatest joys- surprising newcomers. You get to be as old as I am, you take your fun where you can.”

Miklan barked a laugh at that, as they continued down into the town... his eyes tracing the great cliffside carving.

Indech smiled as he looked at it. Her statue, his great tribute to her. He had worked on it for... decades, centuries, getting it just right. It was so hard, to create, to learn, to... to _make _things, he had never been jealous of humans until he had tried to shape stone into lifelike shape.

His mother had sought to make them eternal, to give them great lifespans similar to her own, but there was a cost to everything; she had to take _potential _out of them, to solidify it into _actuality_, and that meant they had so much less of it than humans did. The inner chaos of a human could be given life in poetry and dreams and literature; but a dragon's insides were orderly, they had to work twice as hard to be half as creative. Sometimes, Indech thought he'd only managed the carving because he was trying to copy Cethleann's form as it had been, instead of inventing a new thing.

But his mother had not taken _all _the chaos out of their souls, and that something was _hard _did not mean it was _impossible._

And it wasn't like he hadn't had _time_.

So, eventually, the cliff took her shape. Cethleann, the prophet, prophet to her people, who went crying out into the wilderness when Sothis' own daughter proved unworthy of the crown she'd inherited. Cethleann, whom they had followed towards the ugly red light from his mother's bones, which in Nemesis' hands had proven, against all odds, holy.

( Nemesis. Divine murderer. Nemesis. Mortal hero. Indech had never known what to feel about him; hatred, obviously... but then admiration, for his courage, for the intensity of his struggle to do the right thing by the very woman he had murdered. Towards the war's end, Indech thought that he might have even come to like him- if for no other reason than because, no matter how much Indech hated him for killing his mother, Nemesis had hated himself for it _more_, and that was the strangest thing of all.)

In human lands, Nemesis had his stained-glass and his accolades in human lands; here, in the land of Nabateans, Cethleann took pride of place, and their finest monument to her was Indech's great cliff carving.

At the cliff's top was a relief of her as she truly was: the honorable leviathan, hewn straight from the rock over long years. Her six great fins; the sleek, powerful sea-serpent mass of her body; the head, great wide eyes and wide carp mouth, that strong toothless jaw. He'd found a patch of sea-green stone while digging out the relief that had been _perfect _in color, he had used it for her eyes, which sparkled in the sunlight, magnificent against the dusky red stone.

Beneath, he had carved the upper half of her human body, her hair using up the rest of that perfect seagreen stone, her eyes and face beneath that lovely color kind and smiling; her dragonstone dangled down to touch the ground, and her hands were cupped before it, palms flat and open. That part Indech was particularly proud of; the palms of her hands were the bridge over the river at the mountain's foot, and her dragonstone formed the doors to the temple. It had taken him a good decade to figure out how to make _that _whole thing work.

“ What's... that?” Miklan said, wrenching his gaze from the plate-maield dragon with an effort, awed by the sculpture's size.

“ Cethleann's temple,” Indech said. “ We remember our holy ones and our dead, too.”

Miklan paused, thinking something very hard, picking at his scar... and then spoke up very gently.

“ You know, they say she's alive down in Adrestia,” the scarred man said, with gentleness you would not have expected from a man who looked so much like a hacked-at tree stump. Miklan knew the words he was about to say had edges, and so he did not hurl them into the conversation, but delicately picked them up, so Indech could examine them safely. “ They say a lot of things about the Black Eagles, though.”

“ Leonie told me the rumors,” Indech said. “ But I remember her- the way Seiros had savaged her. It would have been touch and go with all our healers attending her... and when Cichol carried her off, well, that was it.”

“ Maybe,” Miklan said, but his hand unconsciously worried at his scar. “ My wife, though... she keeps a newspaper. She used to be a bodyguard for Lady Edelgard, the leader of the Black Eagles. Right before all hell broke loose, and Adrestia was lost, they printed a drawing of Edelgard and all her Eagles. Probably sheer propaganda, and this would have been half a decade ago... But my wife, she swears that the drawing's accurate for all the people she knew personally, the princess and her Brigid retainer and some dark mage who looks kind of like he just killed somebody.”

Indech raised an eyebrow as Miklan plunged on with his seemingly-meaningless anecdote.

“ And... well, I hate to say this. It feels cruel, without... more. But I've seen that girl. That statue? I saw her. She was healing them, and she looked just like that, except with bad scars all over her. Big one on her neck, two little ones on her jaw- couple marks in other places.”

( Cethleann, torn in pieces, Seiros biting at her face, her neck, blood splattering everywhere, Holiness gutting the Sea like the fish she so resembled. Indech had rushed, tackled Seiros away, caught a blast of breath that tore through his left side for it, the sickening swirl of light constrained so tightly it not only burned but _cut. _Cethleann, almost in chunks, eyes glassy and dead, warping back to human in desperation to conserve energy as her last act; Cichol, picking his daughter up in his arms, and if Indech could have moved he would have ripped his head off for the insult; but he only lived because Nemesis was there, Nemesis tackling Seiros all on his own to buy Indech's allies time to move him, red light blazing, the Sword a lashing whip all around him.)

Indech swallowed heavy.

“ What was the name of this girl whose portrait you saw?” he asked.

“ Wasn't Cethleann,” Miklan grunted. “ Flame... no, something else... Flayn. Flayn, that's it.”

Flayn... _Flayn._

“ Are you sure?” Indech choked out. “ Flayn?”

“ Yes,” this most-surprising human said softly, seeing the spark of recognition in Indech's eyes.

“ Impossible,” Indech said, even as his mind recalled the woman. The brave healer, who had approached them fearlessly, who had healed sweet Cethleann of her wounds and become the first human to count her as a friend. Flayn, half mother, half confidant, and all teacher- the woman who taught Cethleann to heal, in the slow times of the war, who taught her how to put the guts back _in _a person, not just how to tear them out. Flayn, who had been so full of that fragile strength Indech so admired in humanity, whom Indech had accounted as a friend, at the war's end.

She'd lived all that time, had survived until the last days, when Nemesis disappeared and his nation tried to eat itself. She had been the last human he'd seen before he left, grieving the niece he had failed, fleeing north with her tribe, in hopes his people could have space to repopulate and regrow after all their losses.

He'd offered to let her come with him, her and all her family; they were friends, and he trusted her, trusted her enough to let her stay where he hoped his people could experience a rebirth.

She was not the only one he'd approached; a few other humans had impressed him enough that he wanted their descendants to live alongside his own. Mighty Bergliez, who had killed more enemies than anyone who wasn't one of the Elites; Varley, who had always been Indech's favorite, the woman from the arid lands clever and an inventor long after Seiros and the Javelins had murdered all the other makers of things. Ochs, who had no talent at all, save that his loyalty and integrity were so unquestionable that it made something special of him, a pillar of any community he chose to be part of.

But they had all refused. Flayn had been their ringleader; they had a plan. Flayn and her new husband- she'd remarried at some point, some brave man- were going to form a new noble House, and they were going to throw all their weight behind Nemesis' youngest daughter, named Sothis, who for all her youth seemed to be the only one of his kids with her head attached the right damn way. She wanted to preserve the Empire, and all the ways of her father and Saint Cethleann, and so it was that the baby of the family was the only one who spoke with the wisdom of an adult in those times. The four of them were going to support her, their families to become great noble Houses and pit their strength to her cause.

( It'd worked, Indech found out later; Sothis the Smith they called that daughter, whom Nemesis had named after the divinity he had murdered; a woman who had accomplished the impossible, and held onto the land her father had made, proving worthy to bear the weight of her name.)

They'd encouraged him to leave before it got messy; this was a human mistake, they'd told him, and human hands had to end it. Let Indech and his people go free; let his village be, truly, a village for his people alone.

( “ We own the rest of the planet,” Flayn had said, in her straightforward way. “ Won't kill us to let you guys have a piece. A people deserve a land of their own.”)

They'd shook hands, and nodded, the last respects between friends, crystal clear in the perfect memory of a dragon.

“ She... Flayn... Flayn taught her how to heal,” Indech said. “ If she's calling herself Flayn... she might... but she _died_. Cichol stole her corpse.”

Miklan shrugged. “ I don't know what to tell you; I'm just reporting what I've heard.”

If she was alive... Goddess. The _joy _of that; his heart leapt in his chest at the very idea. His little niece, alive...

“ Goddess,” Indech said. “ I...”

Cethleann, alive. He wondered what she'd think of all this.

She'd... she'd probably be disappointed, he thought with a disbelieving giggle, she'd be so _mad _at him. All he'd done since stepping into her shoes seemed like so very little, when you came right down to it; he was a terrible successor. Cethleann had led them to glory against Seiros, had upheld Sothis' teachings, and helped build the Empire of Adrestia; Indech had a house by a lake, a statue, and a little village, those were his accomplishments. The elder had inherited leadership from the younger, and proven he was _worse _with it; she'd mock him, almost certainly, part of being family was the ability to rag on each other.

And... and he would give almost anything, to hear her yell at him, for her to be present _to _yell at him. For her to be alive, and whole again, his little niece not punished for her courage but rewarded, and chewing him out for being shit as a leader.

If she was alive...

He looked at her statue, and for the first time in a long time, he felt that terrible thing humanity and Nabatean both must simply call _hope_.

-

“ This doesn't make any damn sense,” Dorothea said, holding her chin in her fingers as she and her retainer Raphael stood alongside Felix and Ashe, all four staring at the the spot where Lorenz' command tent had, apparently, exploded.

“ So... you guys didn't do this,” Felix stated. Dorothea shook her head.

“ Nope,” she said. “ We thought about attacking the tent, of course, it wouldn't be the first time we'd cut the knot before us by assassinating the commander... but it was too deep behind enemy lines, too risky and too well-protected.”

“ Well, _we_ didn't do it,” Ashe offered.

“ So we have a mystery, then,” Felix muttered, rubbing at the thin hair on his chin, cut in the style his father had worn in his last days. “ I don't much like mysteries. They get people killed.”

They were all quiet for a minute, just standing there in a circle. They were fairly removed from the hubbub of their two armies, and their guards had deployed as a screen around them, watching for enemies- though it would be hard to approach them stealthily, they were surrounded by open fields. Lorenz had chosen his command post well; this had been deep in the Allied camp, and had good sightlines.

Their guards talked quietly amongst themselves- generally Faerghi asking the Eagles a few questions- while, in the distance, their armies woke up and began their day, a distant noise on the breeze.

Raphael finally broke the silence.

“ Maybe he torched it when the battle started to turn?” Raphael said. “ To destroy any intelligence we could have gained.”

“ If he had that much time, why not just run with it?” Dorothea asked. “ Worse, several of the commanders we've interrogated have said that the command staff just... disappeared at one point. None of the messengers could find them.”

“ You've broken them that quickly?” Ashe said, boggled, and Dorothea gave him a smirk.

“ We're Black Eagles,” she replied simply, and their reputation was such that Felix and Ashe simply nodded.

They had no idea of the truth; Black Eagle interrogations were a simple thing, for all that they rarely had a chance to do it. Taking prisoners, after all, was resource-intensive; and given their nature as a smash-and-grab rebel force, most of the time they simply killed their enemies.

Still, sometimes capture was the better option, when they needed information, and they'd gotten good at extracting it. Not by torture; torture was something they'd all found mostly useless except in the most unusual and extreme circumstances, though it was admittedly excellent stress relief for the torturer. Torture a soul, and it'll tell you anything just to make the pain stop, not necessarily the truth- and the smarter, more vindictive ones would tell you a believable lie, just to spite you.

But keep someone a little while, mostly by themselves, and treat them fairly, and eventually they'll tell you everything they know. Humans were social creatures, after all, and if the only person you see for days was your jailer, and they seemed friendly enough... well, eventually, you'd talk.

They mostly killed them afterwards, something they made no bones about- they could not risk a former captive talking to his commander about their locations- but they did make them an offer to join, first. The Eagles were perpetually low on manpower, after all. Most took the deal; not a few of the current flock of Eagles were former captives. More than half proved loyal enough turncoats; those who didn't were killed before they did any harm, because Dorothea was not stupid, and had proven eyes watching any would-be recruit.

But that wasn't why these officers had talked. The few they'd caught seemed foolish almost to a soul, and they'd been almost eager to talk, convinced the Eagles were going to feed them to their dragons. One had even pissed himself. Cowards and dumbasses, the lot of them; there were only three Dorothea thought were worthwhile officers, and none of them had talked, though one had managed, with some effort on her part, to spit directly into Hubert's eye.

The rest, though, they were all singing the same song, and that was what worried Dorothea.

“ I bow to superior skill,” Felix said politely. Which was... weird on its own merits. Her memories of Felix the rude, eager swordsman did not mesh with this calm, polite, very noticeably weaponless man before her, who wore the robes of a mage. “ What all did they say? Our own interrogators haven't reported back yet.”

“ They're all saying the same things,” Dorothea answered. “ Which concerns me, since they don't seem disciplined enough to be giving us a pre-planned story. They are all saying that their commander disappeared, mid-battle. All of them say they were promoted recently, and that their former officers were rapidly jailed in the last few months, or replaced- but all of these soldiers are failures, incompetent. There's a handful of the whole lot that might be worth their post, but that's it.”

“ That's not like Lorenz,” Felix said. “ We've fought him often, and he's dangerous. Not like... this.”

“ We haven't fought him much,” Dorothea said. “ What's he usually like? We fought him a few times years ago, and vaguely remember he favored a mixed military, not this... monolothic block of archers. He didn't even have much cavalry.”

“ And Lorenz loves his cavalry,” Felix replied. “ Every fight we get into with him, we joke that he must be a Kingdom general at heart- there's always a significant mounted component to his military, most of them mages as well. He has a lot of archers, of course, he's still from the Alliance, but your memories serve you well; he favored large, complex armies. In many ways, he was the best of the Alliance generals, especially once Judith was executed for treason.”

“ Shame about that,” Dorothea said, shaking her head. “ Judith was trying to rebel against Rhea... though we've heard she's still alive. Apparently the execution got interrupted by some archer, who shot the ropes, and some big guy in black plate mail with a scythe... a lot of people think we did it, but it wasn't us. We're not sure where she is now.”

“ Interesting,” Felix said. “ I'll keep that in mind. But as to Lorenz... his skills are no joke. This, though... this was just... off. Wrong. And the lack of discipline was simply appalling.”

“ I saw that, too,” Dorothea said. “ No backbone in this army. They were so sloppy that frankly it probably saved more of our troops' lives than anything we ourselves did; they broke and ran much faster than I was expecting them to do. If they'd stood and fought...”

“ Quantity has a quality all its own,” Felix said, that old adage that every general knew to be true. At some point, all warfare was just a game of numbers, and a big enough number only ever led to one conclusion. “ I'm grateful they ran as well- and grateful for that magnificent surprise attack you Eagles managed to pull. We were able to use our own strengths to sweep the field, and I thank you for it.”

“ You're welcome,” Dorothea said. “ Faerghus and Adrestia need each other or we're both going to be serving dragons for the rest of our lives.”

Felix nodded in agreement as Ashe spoke up.

“ There's one more thing,” Ashe said. “ You probably haven't noticed this yet, because your group is smaller and so you need less, but I spent most of last night combing the supply train we captured. I've gotten pretty good at appraising stuff to take- well, I guess I always was good at it, but I've been a quartermaster for a while now.”

“ Ashe has an excellent eye for spotting secrets and a good head for numbers,” Felix said. “ There's a reason I rely on him so heavily.”

Ashe blushed at the praise. “ Heh, I guess. Umm... anyway, I was looking at the caravan, and then I was comparing what my people were telling me they were finding with what we _should _have been finding, and something doesn't add up. There's a lot less of some stuff there than I'd expected. For an army that size, especially with that many archers, the caravans should have been just _awash_ with arrows, bowstrings, unstrung bows, fletching feathers and arrowheads- I mean, we should have been able to make a mountain of that kind of stuff, right?”

“ But there just... wasn't that much. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's still a ton of equipment for our army, every archer we have can shoot arrows from now til sunset without really impacting the supply much, but we also have way fewer archers than he did. And the stuff he did have, well, so much of this stuff was just... wrong.”

Dorothea nodded. “ Hubert came to the same conclusion. Tell me, what leads you to this belief?”

“ Well, he didn't have big cavalry units, right? I mean, just messenger's horses and stuff,” Ashe said. “ But the caravans are full of horseshoes, nails, even anvils for repairing them. And that's not all that was weird. He had a bunch of stuff for heavy infantry, even though I didn't see any on the field. No heavy infantry but I swear, there was a wagon that was literally just heavy infantry armor. No joke. I popped that wagon open and almost died when all that steel fell out.”

“ What the hell?” Raphael stated more than asked. “ That doesn't make any sense.”

“ It wasn't as weird as the gemstone collection, though,” Ashe said. “ Couple of wagons just had all these weird gems and all this weird magical lab equipment.”

“ Dragonstones,” Dorothea said, then saw the nonplussed stares of the Lions. “ Oh, sorry, I forgot you don't have manaketes. Dragonstones are how manaketes return to their true forms as dragons. Their weapon, if you will.”

“ Really?” Felix said. “ How do they work?”

“ It's more simple than it sounds,” Dorothea said. “ Rhea- well, she's actually... you know what, no, I'll tell you who Rhea is later, that's something everybody needs to be present for. Kind of a big deal. Anyway, _Rhea_ spent centuries messing with dragonstones, so we know a lot about them thanks to her experiments. A dragonstone is basically a gem that lets the manakete form a gateway to their true form. We used to think it actually contained that form, but that turned out not to be true; a dragon's true form is always with it, just locked away. You just have to find a key to open that door. Gems and alchemical equipment can be turned into dragonstones.”

“ What's it using, some configuration of a warp spell?” Felix asked, intrigued. “ Substituting a human being for the original form, but maintaining a tie to the original body so it may be summoned up at any time, maintaining it in the limbo you go to when you teleport-”

“ That's what we figured as well,” Dorothea said, favoring him with a sideways smile. “ When did you become such a scholar of magic?”

“ When my father died,” Felix replied, which lobbed a brick of ice into the conversation.

A moment after in the dead silence, he caught his mistake, and said, “ Apologies. I am... still not the most nuanced speaker. I'm working on it.”

Grateful to have a different topic, Dorothea said, “ I noticed that you didn't seem to be as brusque as you used to be, back in school.”

Felix smirked. “ I... a lot's happened, Dorothea. When I took over after my father... passed away, I gave up my sword, took up magic... and the greater burden of rule. I had to grow up.”

_A lot's happened._ Felix had acquired a talent for understatement in his self-improvement efforts. Flashes of the last five years went through Dorothea's mind- her first combat kill, bandits in Zanado, and so long ago that she almost couldn't even remember it. She could vaguely recall being horrified, wondering if this was standard Church practice. She remembered singing in choir, bad jokes in the cafeteria, flirting with all and sundry and the reactions... Sylvain's distant interest, Ingrid's refusal, and above all Edelgard's strange denied want, the way that every look Dorothea sent her lit the girl on fire, even as she said no.

Now the Church was dead everywhere but Faerghus, and Dorothea's hands were so skilled at killing she could barely recall that first bandit, all those years ago. The most common songs on her lips these days were war songs, boastful ballads, or simply her own spells, thundering forth from her. And Edelgard had gone inside herself, the girl who could not admit she liked Dorothea now denying herself not just her desires, but the world entire.... though that had changed, too, as recently as this morning, the memory a bright warmth to Dorothea.

( They had done nothing but hold each other and kiss and talk. They would have time for more later; it was enough to lay there and know they had each other, know that they both wanted it, that they wanted _each other_. There would be time for more later. It was enough to begin.)

Dorothea shook herself. “ Apologies. Memories.”

“ We all do that, from time to time, “ Felix admitted quietly. “ It's nothing.”

“ So, Ashe, you were saying the supply train was wrong?”

“ Yes,” Ashe replied. “ There's too much stuff for heavy infantry and cavalry, and not enough for archers. And there's a lot of these gems, which we could sell for cash or apparently turn into these dragonstones ya'll use. Which, if you don't mind me asking, why do the dragons run around as humans anyway?”

“ Convenience, mostly,” Dorothea said. “ For whatever reason, while the dragon body's floating around in limbo, they only have to eat enough to keep the human form going. Human bodies are also much smaller, so getting around's simpler, and since humans are so numerous, well, most things we make are made for our bodies, so it makes interacting with the world easier, too. Some were using human forms to hide among us, though of course that was generally before Seiros.”

Dorothea grinned. “ Also, every manakete I've ever met loved food. Dragons don't have a sense of taste, but human bodies do.”

“ No sense of taste,” Raphael said, and pantomimed wiping away a noble tear from his eye. “ The Goddess was truly cruel.”

Felix barked a surprised laugh at that, Ashe looked vaguely discomfited and Dorothea rolled her eyes. It wasn't the first time Raphael had used that joke.

“ At any rate... so not enough supplies for what he had, but lots for things he didn't have,” Dorothea said, shaking her head and staring at the ashes that had once been a commander's tent, hoping for inspiration to strike.

“ Supplies for stuff we've got, mostly,” Raphael noted. “ It's almost like he was trying to resupply _us_.”

(Some distance away, Claude had a bout of paranoia, but after a careful check of his alchemy lab, dismissed it as a false alarm. Paranoia, in his line of work, was not an affliction, but damn near a superpower.)

And Dorothea did not like the sound of that, even as she knew it couldn't _possibly _be true- but some part of her was beginning to consider it. Unconsciously, she reached up to adjust the hat that wasn't there, and worried. Claude was clever, after all; maybe the supplies...

“ Check them,” she said, suddenly convinced it was a trap. “ There has to be _something _wrong with them. I'm going to put my troops back on old rations until we've checked the food. This... this smacks of a trap.”

“ But that wouldn't make any sense either,” Ashe protested. “ I mean, we'll check, but- if he was smart enough to boobytrap his supply train, why not just wait at the Bridge? None of this makes any sense.”

“ And that's driving me crazy,” Dorothea admitted. “ I can't figure out what's going on here.”

She shook her head, staring into the ashes of Lorenz's tent, hoping an answer would materialize out of the fire.

-

At the Great Bridge of Myrddin, where silence reigned, a vulture was disgruntled.

This was not a normal state of affairs for a vulture, which are by nature happy and fulfilled creatures doing the important work of cleaning up corpses. Stuff died all the time, and somebody had to take care of it, so in came nature's winged janitors, their bald heads marks of pride in their task.

It was even more unusual to be disgruntled right now, in the midst of this war. With the war on, death was even more prevalent than usual; vultures, who feasted on it, had eaten well in these lean times. This very vulture, in fact, had thought it had spotted a great bounty of corpses- and it had been first on the scene! Nature recognized no concept of “dibs”, so it was important to get your bites in as fast as you could.

But these corpses... something was wrong with them. It tried to take a bite.. no, ack, something its tongue tasted told it this was _wrong_. It spat and coughed, hacking out the foreign substance that tried to slide down its throat.

Ack!

It hopped over to another corpse, a wyvern this time, and tried again. No, still more of this... substance... slick and fluid. Some kind of poison, it figured, and despaired. No wonder there were no bugs on any of these meals! It should have paid attention to that; if even _flies _didn't want to eat it, there was nothing for a proper birdie to eat either.

It squawked, hopped down the bridge, towards a covered place.

It peeked in, curious. There was a corpse in here, too, and it stared at it for a minute; the bird, not knowing what a drawing was, pulled back from the body, which had a strange design, it looked like... wings?

It shook its head. No flies on that body, either. It turned, and flapped away, privately fuming. An entire bridge full of corpses, and none of them you could eat!

Sometimes the world just wasn't fair to a bird.

-

_This has been a great day,_ Leonie thought, as the caravan entered Cethleann proper. Finally, _finally, _it was all finally coming together. It had taken her four years, but looking at what she stood on the verge of accomplishing, four years seemed almost too _fast_; she was better at this work than she'd have thought she'd be, back at the beginning, when she had left Derdriu with the beginnings of her son forming in her belly.

Four years, in which she'd accomplished so much. She'd saved Judith from her execution, though Rhea had tried to cover it up, pretend that Daphnel's Lord was dead in the ground. It hadn't worked; Leonie, with Judith at her side, had managed to gather the scattered remnants of House Daphnel back under her banner- and how ironic, that the House which had lost its vote on the Council of the Alliance would be the very same House that would resurrect it, if all went well. Daphnel's star, once fallen, was now to rise again.

But the Daphnel warriors did not stand alone. To Judith she had gathered not just all that was left of Daphnel, but all the remnant of every noble house that had stood against Rhea and her takeover, whom Claude had been careful not to wound too badly as he drove them into the western wilderness.

To them Leonie had appeared, with Judith's banner flying, and gathered them to Daphnel, swelling the ranks of the once-diminished House until it stood stronger than it ever had, its disparate components united by the desire for revenge on their oppressors, and by Judith's dream that Leceister could stand as a free nation once more, not doomed to be remembered in history only as the favored weapon of a tyrant.

Now the last free army of Leceister was based here, preparing for war, alongside Cethleann's tribe- and that was it, that was the dream, of unity at last.

Not an easy dream to make real. It had taken so much effort, to convince Judith to meet with dragons, though strangely Cethleann's tribe had needed little coaxing; she still remembered the look in Indech's eyes when she told him Seiros still lived, a secret Claude had passed to her years before.

But while the dragons were happy to join, it had taken arm-twisting and blackmail and all of Leonie's best arguments to get the Leceisterfolk to team up with them- and she couldn't really blame her fellow countrymen. Of all people in the world save perhaps the rebel Almyrans, these Allied citizens had the most reason to hate dragons; Rhea had made a monster out of Leceister, and every one of her recruits had lost friends and family to her forces when they fought and failed to keep their land the free place it had been.

But in time, they had agreed, and it helped that this was Cethleann's original Tribe; after some initial friction, they had gotten along famously. Having a shared foe had helped, exactly the way Claude had planned it would, all those years ago.

Added to this was her mercenary company, the Blade Breakers, once Jeralt's and now hers by inheritance; she'd recruited busily in the last three years, and now her own forces were significant. Not as large as either the Leceister or Cethleann contingents, but large enough that when she spoke, the others listened, which was all she needed; and the composition was different, she had deliberately built her mercenaries so that they filled in the gaps of the others.

Daphnel's forces were mostly archers- not just because that was Leceister's own heritage, but because those who had survived their clashes with Rhea were disproportionately the troops who were furthest away from the frontlines, which were flattened by draconic breath- and Cethleann's tribe of mighty dragons, while they had healers aplenty, lacked for mages.

But her Blade Breakers were cavalry and infantry, siege weapons and mages- everything she could find that would suffice to support any weaknesses in the resistance. When the time came, they would have to prove unstoppable, or Leceister flags would never fly in free air again.

...Some part of her wondered if Jeralt was with her, if he had thought highly enough of her that, when he died, some piece of him went to her. She hoped so. Shamir was dead of betrayal these long years, but the weapon Jeralt had forged in the form of his soldiers could still strike a blow for him, and she wanted him to know.

To this arrow of Leceister she could add the might of rebel Almyra- and of all her work, she was perhaps proudest that she had dragged Nader himself here, that she had ridden to Almyra on a pirate's vessel and found the rebel king, to convince him to join his might to Leceister's, both victims of Rhea striking back. They'd catch her and her troops in a pincer and destroy her in detail, all the way to Almyra's heart.

She coudn't _wait_ to the see the Faerghus reaction to Nader's presence.

It was almost a shame Claude was going to kill Rhea first- these people would deserve the deathblow against her, especially the Almyrans, who had the right before anyone did.

But between those two nations, and with the help of these Kingdom warriors, who seemed agreeable enough... yes. She'd been worried about Faerghus, but Faerghus had proven quite willing to at least hear them out; she had to hoep that continued.

Maybe the Kingdom was in more dire straits than she'd thought. She remembered Hilda complaining about how difficult it was, to balance killing Faerghus with saving it.

( She wondered how she was doing; how any of them were doing, even as she knew that, as the plan entered its last stages, the answer to that question would inevitably become only one thing- death.)

Still, she kept those thoughts inside. She'd have a chance to go over them later, when she was deciding what to put into the report she'd send to Claude.


	10. Interlude II: An Adrestian Mage in King Dimitri's Court

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little thing this time; Annette's not had much focus, but now with the Kingdom playing a much bigger focus, now's the time!
> 
> So here's a short piece. I haven't abandoned this work at all; I have a lot of writing to do for Fire Emblem yet... I just want to finish my She-Ra stuff first. 
> 
> So here's a bit for ya'll to nibble on!

**Interlude 2**

**An Adrestian Mage in King Dimitri's Court**

Annette walked among her people, and felt a stranger.

It had been a long time since she'd stood with fellow Faerghi. Oh, the Black Eagles had Faerghi aplenty in their ranks, but... it was different, the flag they served under was the Imperial Eagle, her leader was the Emperor of Adrestia, not the King of Faerghus, and most of her own personal troops were Adrestians. She was a mage, after all, and led mages.

That fact had always made her just a little separate from her fellow Faerghi, along with her talkative and cheerful nature. Her father had actually encouraged her, when she had spoken of how... different she felt, how unlike her countrymen she was; Gilbert had been warm and encouraging, and pointed out that it was through people like her that societies _changed_.

( Gilbert, without the horror of his King dying before him, turned out to be a better father than one might suspect, given his visible failure in that regard in so many other timelines.)

She'd loved that idea, had chosen to join the Black Eagles so long ago because she wanted to be the best sorceress possible, teach Faerghus new ways of doing things. A culture wasn't a monolith; just look at all the Leceisterfolk who had joined them, who had turned away from Claude and his dragon-worshipping ways to fight for equality and freedom. She had dreamed of making magic more acceptable in Faerghus, the land of knights uncomfortable with any magic save that of the healer; there was a reason there was only one school of magic in the entire land, and that in Fhirdiad, most cosmopolitan of the nation's cities.

But now, surrounded by blue and white flags... she felt like she was visiting some foreign land. The accents around her, the gentle trill of Faerghus, was stronger than she'd heard in a long time, the Faerghi among the Eagles picking up the harsher tones of Adrestian accents, weighing down their pitch.

_What do I sound like?_ Annette wondered. Her friends were all Adrestians, save Raphael, and he was from the area near Adrestia that shared the accent; she'd sound like an Adrestian, she bet. You picked up the accents around you, she'd read once.

Annette moved among her people, in many senses of the word. Her personal squad of mages accompanied her; Dorothea had ordered anyone who wanted to visit the Blue Lions to take some troops with them, just in case. There was the worst-case scenario, of a Faerghus soldier proving to be a traitor to Leceister and crippling or killing someone in a surprise attack, which could have any number of consequences; there was also the more common and probable issues of drunk soldiers picking fights, being suspected of being a spy, or any number of other damn things that might happen. A bodyguard was just common sense, and Annette agreed, so she'd dragged her squad with her.

Her mage company- all Adrestians, save for a single Morfian- bore the traditional garb of Adrestian mages, the big hats and cloaks in red and black that were the stereotypical uniform of mages across the continent. Adrestia had been first, after all, and magic was the heartblood of the nation...

They got many friendly waves and greetings as they moved in the camp. It was after Dorothea had her little conference at Lorenz's tent; Annette had a short window in which to see her fellow Blue Lions, before some big pitch Dorothea wanted to make. Dorothea had signed off on her going because she hoped it'd butter Dimitri up; Annette hadn't liked that one bit, but Dorothea had plead with her, emphasized that Adrestia needed it...

Adrestia, whose garb she now wore, whose people she commanded and fought for...

The waves and hellos weren't personal. No one said Annette's name, or recognized her. How could they? She was wearing Adrestian colors; these were the friendly greetings of allies, not countrymen.

Her sensation of strangeness grew.

They wandered through the camp, her eyes looking for her former classmates. No one had questioned them yet, though that almost certainly wouldn't last; somebody would come along and ask their business.

_Class reunion_, Annette thought, and almost snorted despite herself. That was more or less the gist of it.

...She wondered how they'd changed, in the intervening years. They'd heard rumors, of course... but she was a Black Eagle, and thus she knew better than anyone how time and distance had a habit of mutating the truth into fictional shapes. Her own legend literally preceded her; Annette could not count the number of times some new recruit had wanted to meet the Witch Knight, and found not some legendary figure, but merely a Faerghus ex-patriate who liked singing made-up songs and couldn't walk ten steps without tripping.

She supposed she'd done some impressive things, or at least, she'd done things that _sounded _impressive if you hadn't been there. For Annette, though, when she was in the thick of it... there was just her cheery rage, beating like a nonstop drum in her heart. All she had to do was think of all the things the Alliance had taken from her, and off she went, turning her pain into power, the world's happiest berserker.

It was why she got Edelgard's, err, _issue. _Annette personally thought it was because Edelgard was _too _angry, she'd gotten so mad that it burned up everything inside and left her cold ashes. Annette's fury wasn't nearly so dangerous to her, her flame wasn't so concentrated that it wielded her, instead of her wielding it.

_But now that Petra's back..._ Annette thought, remembering their conversation, how Edelgard seemed healthier, better. Annette got that; she still had her periods of focusless wandering, and anxiety crawling up and down her back. Maybe it was like that. Maybe having her best friend back would heal her Emperor.

_Sothis, watch over Edelgard, and bring her back to us_, she prayed, quietly. Prayer... she hadn't prayed in years. Not a purposeful decision, just... there was so much to do. At the start, it had been her, Raphael, and Flayn holding the Eagles together at Dorothea's command, and it had kind of fallen away in those desperate early days, too busy running to pause for breath to pray.

And then before combat, when so many prayed... well, Annette actually _liked _combat, she was at ease with killing, so she didn't need to pray for comfort. They'd taken her father from her, after all- so she liked taking her pound of flesh back. She relished battle. Not all the stories of the Witch Knight were just fable. She'd caught herself cackling once or twice, laughing as the wind tore at her enemies...

...She was a bit ashamed of that, now. She wondered what Mercedes would think of it. What stories had she heard? She knew Dorothea had met with her, as had Edelgard- to the extent Edelgard had “met” anyone in the last five years- but Annette had been off on a raid at the time. Shame; she'd have loved to catch up with her.

The others... how had they fared? Was Felix still as weird and sword-obsessed as he had been? Had Ingrid achieved her dreams of being a peerless knight?

_Had Sylvain ever stopped being a dick? _she thought, and giggled to herself. That was a _little _unfair- even back at Garreg Mach, underneath the outward sort of contempt, there had been a better man inside- but the thought amused her, and distracted her from this... odd emptiness inside.

...Ugh. She _hated _this. She was terrible at brooding. Give her the bright spark of rage or a fresh breeze of general joy any day. She was a chipper, upbeat person by nature. This... _gloom_... was unnatural to her spirit; give it to Hubert or Ferdinand, they would have handled this better.

A messenger ran up, distracting her from her uncharacteristic brooding.

“ Greetings!” he said cheerfully, and Annette was momentarily assailed by visions of the Gatekeeper- but this man had the dark skin of Duscur, and his accent was so strongly Faerghus that she suspected him of being a native-born, one of the numerous people of mixed ethnicity on either side of the divide. “ Lord Gaspard heard there was a band of Black Eagles in camp. What can we do for you?”

“ I... tell Dimitri- sorry, tell Lord Gaspard that Annette, their old classmate, wishes to see King Blaiddyd ,” she said, and hoped it wasn't improper. She wasn't sure _what _she was supposed to say- her title? Was her family still alive? She guessed her uncle would be the current Lord of the family, in distant lands...

...Distant lands. An odd way to think of one's home.

Odder still, to think of Dimitri, gentle, awkward Dimitri as _King Blaiddyd_. And Lord Gaspard- probably Christophe, but what if it was Ashe? She'd heard he got adopted in the last few years...

_Lord Gaspard_. That would be weird to say to him. She wondered how they all looked.

“ Annette- Sothis' coffin, are you the Witch Knight?!?” the messenger said, looking her over a bit disbelieving.

“ I... yes,” Annette said, and managed a sardonic grin. “ I'm not precisely what you were expecting, I imagine.”

“ Nope!” the man admitted cheerfully. “ For one thing, I thought your eyes glowed? Also you're supposed to be super tall, blonde, and got like a manic laugh thing going on.”

“ I... no,” Annette said, chuckling. “ Okay, all of that except the blonde part I've heard. Why am I blonde in these stories?”

The man shrugged. “ No idea,” he said. “ So... have you done all the stuff they say?”

“ She has,” one of her mages replied. “ She won't say it, but she has.”

“ Gort!” she chided, snapping her head to him, and the Adrestian chuckled.

“ Sorry, boss,” he said, tipping his hat lightly to her, “ but you always downplay all you've done.”

Turning to the messenger, he said, “ I've seen her do incredible feats, Faerghi. Stuff you wouldn't believe. Hell, I was _there_, and I have trouble believing it!”

“ Ugh,” Annette said, shaking her head. “ Ignore him. Go get Dimitri, would you?”

“ On it, ma'am!” the knight said, snapping a salute before retreating. As he left, Annette turned a glower on Gort.

“ My apologies, boss,” he said again, fiddling with his hat, “ but I don't want you downplaying yourself in front of all these Faerghi. You're my commander, you've done great things; they should know.”

“ I... thank you, Gort, but don't speak out of line again,” Annette said.

It took her a minute to realize just what he'd said.

_All these Faerghi_. Not even a single acknowledgement that she, too was Faerghi.

( _Right? _she thought.)

Her sensation of alienation grew.

In time, a different messenger approached, a knight in full plate wearing a great lion-headed helmet.

“ I am here for Annette Dominic,” the visitor said... but that voice...

“ ...Ingrid?” Annette asked, and the lion-headed knight laughed.

“ Goddess, it's good to see you!” the lady knight said. “ And just _look _at you! Little Annette grew up!”

Annette chuckled, her heart lightening just at the sound of her old frien'ds voice. “ It's... it's good to see you,” she said. “ Quite an impressive helmet you have there!”

Ingrid laughed. “ Come on, everyone's waiting to see you!”

They moved through the camp, an easier task with Ingrid at their head- so many soldiers, nodding or bowing, or tapping friends, getting them to look.

_Look! That's the Witch Knight!_

_She's with Ingrid Almighty!_

_The Widow and the Witch... wonder what they're doing._

_Witch Knight looks fancy with that big hat!_

_ That's how Adrestians dress, they like big hats 'cause it's so hot where they live._

_Wish I lived in a hot country..._

_Shut up Sasha._

Annette giggled. The rhythm was familiar, something she'd heard in the Black Eagles' camp so many times in this last half-decade from rookies and recruits, the common man seeing something out of story, half awe and half inanity. Ingrid had become a living legend...

_ Just like me_, Annette thought wryly. What odd times to live in.

In time, they reached the great command tent. Ingrid took time to bow to the Duscur guards before turning back to Annette.

“ Your mages will have to wait outside, but you are a guest here, as are they. No harm will come to them,” Ingrid said.

“ Wait here,” Annette said to her squad. “ Standard practices.”

“ Got it,” Gort replied, as they set up in a casual circle, watching the camp around them.

Standard practices... a code Dorothea had come up with, code for a simple plan. If they were attacked, her squad would send up signals to warn any other Eagles, bright and loud fireballs up in the air. Just another one of Dorothea's ideas... nothing like the war Annette's childhood books of chivalry had described, nothing like any war she'd studied at Garreg Mach; they'd have to invent a word for it.

Standard practices probably wouldn't be necessary here... but you never knew. She'd spent too long on the run not to be prepared.

She followed Ingrid into the tent, and time stopped.

They sat gathered around a table filled with papers, and her eyes drank them in as they looked over her. Dimitri, whose face was more gaunt, sharper featured, a king's crown on a brow furrowed from five years of war. Dedue next to him, who but for a few scars was the same, dependable as stone. Felix, who looked strange in the robes of a mage, whose severe face was softening as he looked at her. Sylvain, who didn't seem to have that nervous energy left anymore, who seemed to have finally settled into the skin of a grown man. Ashe, who was missing a finger, but gave her the same friendly smile he'd alawys had.

For just a second, five years had not passed; for just a second, nothing had passed between them at all.

Felix broke the moment.

“ Annette!”

Then they were up, scrambling around the desk, and she was being hugged, this pride of Lions dogpiled their lost little one.

“ Annette! You're alive!”

“ We heard stories-”

“ Good to see you looking good! You grew into a beauty!”

“ _Sylvain._”

She hugged back... sort of; there was only so much Annette to go around, after all. Her hat got smooshed up against Dedue's shoulder; her face got buried in Dimitri's furry ruff, and she nearly suffocated. She hugged what she thought was Felix, and maybe part of Ingrid.

...She might have teared up. Just a little. She rubbed her eyes on Dimitri's fur; she wasn't going to break down in tears. She _was _a Faerghi, after all.

They broke apart, and there were smiles on every face. In all this war, they'd somehow made it.

“ Annette,” Dimitri said, with a smile. “ It is so good to see you.”

“ Same to you, Dimitri,” she said. “ I... I didn't expect it to take five years.”

“ No,” Sylvain said, “ I imagine you didn't foresee any of this, when you joined Byleth's class.”

“ Didn't she die?” Ashe asked.

“ She recovered,” Annette answered.

“ Is Flayn actually Saint Cethleann?” Ingrid asked.

“ Yes,” Annette said, “ I was surprised, too.”

“ I... wait, we're being terrible,” Felix said. “ Please, sit, Annette. Anything you want to eat? We've plenty enough now.”

He waved the group back, presenting a chair to Annette personally.

“ Thank you,” Annette said, and gave him a smile. “ I don't feel like eating, but I wouldn't mind a drink. Do you have any wine?”

“ Absolutely,” Felix said. “ What would you prefer?”

“ Something red and sweet,” she said.

Felix pointed at one of the servants in the room- servants Annete just now noticed, finally able to see something other than her old friends. Servants and guards.

“ Go see if we have some of that Red Varley left,” he said, and the servant left.

Felix settled down into his own seat, and no one said anything for a long moment, before Annette picked the thread back up.

“ Where's Mercie?” she asked. “ I don't see her here...”

The smiles that left their faces told her the story, even before anyone spoke.

...Oh.

_Oh_.

She didn't hear Dimitri's sad explanation. Not really.

( Mercie. She'd missed seeing her... and now she never would. Mercie, her best friend in Fhirdiad... _Mercie, _who was so kind to her stupid, clumsy ass. Dead- another person taken from her by Leceister.)

She closed her eyes, and reached inside herself, for her anger, her strength in these times, and leaned on it.

Wind swirled in the room, quiet and angry, a thrum of tension like the world holding its breath.

“ I will kill them,” she swore. “ I will kill them all.”

When she opened her eyes, Dimitri seemed a bit spooked, though Felix seemed mostly impressed.

“ How... how did Mercie die?” she asked.

“ I sent her on a mission to find an ancient Agarthan artifact,” Dimitri said sadly. “ If blame exists... it is mine.”

Annette shook her head. “ Unless you ordered her to _die_, that is simply not true. The Alliance killed her.”

“ Regardless,” Dimitri said, “ it's why we're out here at all. We need to cross the Great Bridge, then we can cut east and find where she was... find the thing she found.”

“ She did find something, then?” Annette asked, and Dimitri nodded.

“ She didn't die in vain... cold as that comfort is,” Dimitri said.

“ Cold comfort is better than none,” Annette replied. “ We've... we've all lost people in this war.”

How many times had Annette stood over dying Eagles, or tried to breathe life back into them with her spells? She was relatively poor at healing magic compared to the kind that killed, but it had been enough for a few Eagles... and not enough for many others.

“ True,” Sylvain said, frowning.

Her wine arrived at that moment, and the servant poured her a glass in the ensuing quiet. A good bit of Adrestian wine, which she'd developed a taste for among the Eagles. She took a calming sip; this wasn't half-bad, Varley wine was always nice and sweet.

Annette put her drink down, and pushed her hurt and anger to the side. She'd... she'd deal with the dead later, she had the living before her now.

“ Let us focus on the people still alive,” Annette said, and forced herself to smile. Wasn't the first time she'd had to do it over the last five years. “ What's been up with you guys? Did Sylvain ever stop being a dick?”

Dimitri broke out into surprised laughter, as did Ingrid, while Sylvain spluttered and Felix sighed.

( Dedue almost laughed, but with great force of will, stopped himself, and managed to look as if he was suffering terrible gastorintestinal distress in the bargain.)

“ We meet after five years, and _this _is what you say to me,” Sylvain said theatrically with one hand extended into the air, his voice wounded innocence. “ Five years of wondering if you were alive. Five years in which we thought you were dead-”

“ You did?” Annette said. Ingrid nodded.

“ We all did,” she said. “ No one knew what happened after Garreg Mach... We thought all the Eagles had died, you included. This was early on, before the rumors of Black Eagles began to filter back to us in the northwest. I mean, sure, people claimed Edelgard was alive, but there was no actual proof.”

“ I believe that,” Annette said. “ Early on, we were little more than an annoyance to the Alliance, so we weren't really generating any stories. We had nothing, nothing but our own skill and whatever we could scrounge up for supplies. In the first year, we were so desperate for supplies... we raided a fort in Varley's territory once, and we got ten horses. We were _ecstatic_, we had _horses _again. Ten horses was like... I don't know, I can't describe to you how giddy we were. Ten horses was a lot of horses, for a group that didn't have _any_. Even Ferdinand and Hubert were smiling.”

“ How are they doing?” Sylvain asked. “ Ferdinand, he was always so... _nobility! Hmm hmm_. But the way you're talking...”

“ That Ferdinand is dead,” Annette said. “ He's the gloomiest member of our group, even more than Hubert. Losing his noble title and his lands... it ruined him.”

“ Damn,” Sylvain said. Dedue spoke.

“ Hopefully we can restore his lands,” he said. “ One of our goals is the restoration of Adrestia.”

_Good_, Annette thought. _That'll make our work easier_...

( She decided not to think about what that might mean.)

“ Good,” she said out loud. “ Adrestia needs the help.”

“ What about you?” Felix asked.

“ Hmm?” Annette responded.

“ We've heard a lot of stories about the Witch Knight- Cornelia reports that you put out the fire of Arianrhod by removing it and dropping it on someone?” Felix said.

“ Yeah,” Annette said. “ Marianne had turned into some kind of... monster. Hard to describe. I dropped Arianrhod's fire on her.”

“ You talk about that like it's a normal thing,” Dedue commented. “ You have become a magnificent mage, Annette.”

“ Aww, it's nothing,” Annette said, deflecting. “ It's not as impressive as it sounds.”

“ What kind of monster did she become?” Felix asked.

“ Like... half dragon? It freaked Flayn out,” Annette said. “ Something unholy, not human or dragon but somehow worse than both... lesser.”

“ Thank you,” Dimitri said. “ For saving my mother and Arianrhod both. We'd heard they were under attack... but we couldn't stop. The Kingdom Grand Army is too big to wheel about; we were committed.”

“ Speaking of that,” Felix asked, “ what were the Eagles doing up there? It's a bit outside of your normal hunting grounds.”

“ We went to Arianrhod specifically to save your mom,” Annette said. “ We wanted to talk with you, and figured swooping in and saving your mom was a good conversational opener.”

“ I mean, it makes me pretty well-disposed,” Dimitri said, chuckling.

“ Myself as well,” Dedue said. “ Cornelia's a lovely step-mother.”

“ You're welcome,” Annette said. “ Of course, it turned out you were already gone- and here at Gronder Field, because apparently destiny is a hack writer and plays favorites.”

“ It's a bit weird to be here,” Dimitri admitted. “ Gronder Field... where we broke free from the Empire, and where the Empire saved us the second time. That's going to be confusing as hell for future historians.”

“ I think Byleth said that history didn't repeat, but it does rhyme,” Annette said. “ Might have been Edelgard, but I think it was Byleth.”

“ Speaking of the war... If you have any ideas for how to take the Great Bridge, we're all ears,” Dimitri said.

“ Dorothea will come up with something,” Annette said, shrugging. “ I've some ideas in that regard as well.”

She did, too, and she'd spoken with Dorothea about it on the way here. If the Bridge's defenses were all aimed this way, the Eagles would just have their flying and swimming manaketes haul the rest of them across the river, and then they'd attack from behind while the Kingdom Grand Army distracted them with a token attack at the front. As the defenses whirled around to engage the Eagles, the Kingdom would _actually _commit to an attack, and caught between two full-scale assaults from opposite ends, the Bridge would fall.

Of course, even with such a plan, casualties would likely be enormous... but maybe they'd figure out something. They had done just that for five years; be a bad time to drop that winning streak now.

“ Care to share with the class?” Sylvain said, in perfect mimicry of something Hanneman had once said, and even amidst her rage and grief, Annette snorted.

“ Maybe later,” she said. “ Once I've had time to discuss it with the other officers.”

Nods of understanding, and into the brief quiet Ingrid said, “ I named my kid after you.”

“ I- what?” Annette said.

“ We thought you were dead,” Ingrid said. “ When me and Glenn had a child... we wanted to remember you, and our little girl needed a name. So we named her Annette.”

“ ...You're a mom?” Annette asked, and Ingrid nodded her helmed head.

“ Got a little girl,” she said. “ Annette Fraldarius.”

Annette blushed, her heart full of warmth. “ Thank you,” she said. “ I'm honored.”

“ Do you have to rename the kid now that she's alive?” Sylvain asked. “ I mean, you can't name someone after somebody if they're not dead, that's not how it works.”

“ Sylvain!” Ingrid said, turning her covered head to him.

( _Why doesn't she take the helmet off? _Annette wondered.)

“ Well, at least we have answered Annette's question,” Dedue said.

“ Oh?” Dimitri said to his husband.

“ Yes,” Dedue said. “ Sylvain did _not _stop being a dick.”

Annette laughed, and sipped her wine. This felt... comfortable.


	11. Act II: The Egg Hatches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally- time to discuss Faerghus and Adrestia, Edelgard and Dimitri, and the future.
> 
> Thank you for being with me; we're at the midpoint. If this were a rollercoaster, this has been the long climb up... this chapter's the apex. 
> 
> After this... the plunge.

**Act II**

**In the Name of the Griffin**

**The Egg Hatches**

At high noon, Edelgard, accompanied by those of her personal guard who could walk and some replacements Dorothea had hand-picked to replace those too wounded to attend, along with Petra, walked into the Kingdom camp for the first time, with a simple goal: to get King Blaiddyd to agree to a plan that would revive her nation at great cost to his own, create a new nation made entirely out of dragons he would have to share the continent with- again at great cost to his own- and bind his nation to a Federation comprised of Faerghus, Adrestia, and whatever Flayn was going to name her new nation- meaning she was asking him to sign the Kingdom on to a plan with two other nations that didn't actually exist at the moment.

Simple.

...Goddess' teeth. He was going to laugh her out of his tent.

..._Dorothea, what were you thinking?_

No one else shared Edelgard's inner turmoil- save Petra, who was with her, and even as worried and nervous as Edelgard was, that was a comfort, to have her with her in the flesh. The Brigid woman quirked an eyebrow at Edelgard, plainly seeing her concern, but Edelgard just shook her head gently. In this area, Petra couldn't help her. She'd missed a childhood of royal learning, too, after all; they had only had each other for all their youth, and anything Petra knew about government she knew because her and Edelgard had helped each other learn.

Even as kids, Edelgard had a dream that, one day, she could see Petra back on her throne in Brigid, make up for all that was done to her people by restoring her crown to her. Bereft of adult teachers, they'd been forced to teach each other, devouring book after book; what education they'd received had, very conspicuously, _not _included politics, probably at Duke Aegir's request. They had tried to cut her legs out from under her even as a child, in hopes of a puppet emperor... in ways, she owed Claude. His assault meant the plans of the nobility had been for naught... hard to puppet a nation that was _dead_.

( She'd make him pay. In time. In time she would finish the work she had begun at Garreg Mach; she would kill him, and make him pay for all the dead of the last five years.)

Still, for all the grimness of her thoughts, she and Petra were alone in their gloominess. Everyone else was in high spirits, and the general mood was genial; Faerghus soldiers milled about, the blue and white everywhere, the armor and tents all completely uniform, which was a little weird for Edelgard.

_Well, they've had a functional country to produce equipment with_, Edelgard thought to herself. _They didn't have to steal most of their tents and supplies._

The benefits of having a home to defend, and industries supporting the war effort, instead of being a mobile camp... She shook her head, and wiped her brow of sweat. It was getting warm, almost to a proper Adrestian temperature, and a few of the Faerghi were clearly beginning to melt like ice in the heat; still, victory in battle had already warmed up their blood and inured them to the summer heat. Their horses were gulping down water, though, as angry about the temperature as their humans should have been, too unaware of victories to be comforted by them.

Faerghi waved, or tried to chat them up, wondering what this pack of Adrestians was doing in their midst. Many of them ended up recognizing her. She supposed she cut a distinctive figure; between the eyepatch and being barely over five foot in height, it was hard to disguise herself as anyone but who she was.

What was more surprising were the ones who recognized Petra, cheerfully waving at her, something she returned in equal measure. The questions of the Faerghi floated around them; Edelgard caught snatches of it as they walked through the long rows of blue tents and stables, surrounded by the sounds of the vast Kingdom Grand Army.

_That's Edelgard!_

_Last Emperor of Adrestia..._

_I told you the Eagles were real!_

_I owe you ten, fair and square, Julienne._

_Damn glad they were here for us. Saved our lives._

_ Eh, we could have taken'em. But sure made it easier to have the Eagles with us. _

_I had a cousin, I heard he'd joined them... wonder if he's actually with them or he just ran off with that merchant girl..._

_So that's the Phoenix, huh? _

_Phoenix?_

_Yeah, cause she's gonna resurrect Adrestia. The Phoenix. 'Swhat I heard some mage call her._

_She's like, super short. King Dimitri could pick her up and use her as a weapon._

_Timothy, what the hell?_

_I've heard she's as strong as she is tiny, though; more likely she'd pick Dimitri up and use him as a weapon._

_I'd give the ten I just won back to see that._

Edelgard smirked at the mental image. She _did _intend on wielding Dimitri, but in a financial sense, not physical; she needed his money more than his might.

Not that both weren't welcome. The Great Bridge of Myrddin was the hardest target in Fodlan, save perhaps the Locket itself.

Dorothea would come up with something, though. They'd talked a little of it, before she'd sent Edelgard on.

( Edelgard might be the Emperor, but Dorothea was the boss.)

It took time for a messenger to find them; Edelgard wasn't surprised. Technically they weren't an “official” delegation, so they didn't bear the Adrestian flag with them; one of Dorothea's ideas. If this looked less formal, Edelgard would have an easier time playing on Dimitri's emotions. Dorothea wanted it to come off like Edelgard had just wanted to come see him.

Edelgard didn't much like the subterfuge. There was a reason Edelgard's favored weapons were axes and fire; she was powerful and passionate, not subtle. Perhaps in other circumstances, she would have been- but some part of her thinks that, even in other lives, she would have been more force than finesse. She couldn't imagine pulling off something like the Storm Caller thing Claude tried; she'd probably have called herself something like “the Hidden Emperor” or something, or maybe referenced her fiery magic; she never had been any good at naming things.

Yet another reason Dorothea should have been making this plea, not her; what did Edelgard know of diplomacy?

The Adrestian red on their armor, and the Black Eagles on every chestplate, were enough to get a messenger coming along. Sadly, it wasn't the Duscurian who'D reminded Annette so much of Garreg Mach's old gatekeeper, an event she'd told them about; no, it was a tall Faerghi woman of imposing stature.

( Edelgard wondered where that man had ended up, and wished him well, wherever he had went. Such a chipper man; though Edelgard never had caught the guy's name.)

“ Emperor Edelgard,” came the messenger's greeting, all business. She stood ramrod straight. “ Dame Maria, at your service. Might I assist you?”

“ I need to see Dimitri- King Blaiddyd,” Edelgard said, wincing over the misstep. The messenger made no visible reaction, too professional to do so; she instead bowed.

“ Please stay here; I will see if the King is receiving visitors,” she said, and then she was gone, leaving them to stand around, Edelgard feeling suddenly very watched and very nervous. People waved, people shouted, the Eagles were a spectacle... and Edelgard realized this was the biggest group of non-Eagles she'd seen in five years.

But they all seemed happy to see her, to see _them_, and that was good, right? Good, it was good, even though it didn't make Edelgard any less nervous, didn't keep sweat from running under the heavy leather of her eyepatch and poking at the wounded wreck that had once been her eye. Her hands felt cold and clammy, and she only hoped that she wouldn't drop the folder she'd taken with her as a primer, her leather gloves feeling loose around her hands.

...No wonder she'd dove into the ashes for all these years, it was so much _simpler _than all this... worry. Goddess, she hoped she didn't crack. She couldn't retreat, not now, even if all of her nerves were burning her up, not even if the temptation was there, nice and cooling.

“ Hey,” came Petra's voice, quiet, cutting through her fears as the Brigid princess shifted to stand next to the Adrestian princess. “ Are you okay?”

“ Nobody ever asks that of someone who is,” Edelgard said softly, unconsciously shifting to press closer to her best friend. “ I wish I had more time to prepare. But... Dorothea... she was insistent it be today.”

“ Wonder why,” Petra said, frowning. “ She must have a reason.”

Edelgard shrugged. “ I'm sure she does, but I can't parse it out. Wish she'd kissed me less and explained more.”

Petra smirked. “ I must say... I didn't expect to find you so... subordinate. Admittedly, you never _did _know what to do with Dorothea, but she always knew how to handle you.”

That provoked a laugh out of Edelgard, nervous as she was. “ Quite a way to put it.”

They stood in silence then, Edelgard just taking comfort from the presence of family, until the messenger came back.

“ King Bliaddyd is willing to meet with you,” she said. “ Follow me.”

Edelgadr followed, and her mind churned, wondering if anyone would ever know about this, in the future, when history books were written about these days. She was an Adrestian, after all, whose legacy reached back to Fodlan's beginning; history was part and parcel of her blood. Edelgard's history longer than anyone's; it went back the farthest, to Nemesis in history...

_And today, it's on me to make sure it goes forward into the future_, Edelgard thought, and felt the weight of that sentence settle across her back.

( It wasn't so heavy. She had carried all Brigid on her shoulders since childhood, all the atrocity inflicted on her family and that innocent people both; this burden was not so heavy, not so terrible.)

She pondered the possible books of the future as she walked. It would depend on if they won or not. If the Alliance's counter-attack should succeed, this meeting would be dismissed by future writers; an ultimately unimportant act of the eventual losers. Should the Alliance fall, though...

Maybe a fancy tapestry would display this moment. Or maybe it would get forgotten; historians tended towards drama, and peaceful talks with an ally tended to fail that test.

_Maybe Cethleann being here will make it more dramatic_, Edelgard thought. The first treaty in centuries between the Firstborn and the Children; yes, that sounded more to historian's tastes. She might even get an urn.

..._And I shouldn't discount myself or the Eagles, either. The last Emperor of Adrestia, leading a legendary rebellion... well, I was present while Dorothea led it, anyway... and Petra, the Ghost of Brigid, alive again and present... _

Yeah, she might get an urn, but only if this worked.

“ Goddess-in-Byleth,” she prayed aloud, quietly, whispering it to herself, “ keep me from fucking this up.”

( Even amidst her sorrow and despair, Sothis could not help but burble a quick laugh at the sheer honesty of that swift prayer.)

Petra heard it and chuckled, but said nothing else.

Too quickly they were before the great tent. Too quickly was the moment upon her; Edelgard's breath threatened to quicken, and she had to remind herself to calm down. They weren't going to immediately begin negotiating. There'd be... talk first, the dialogue equivalent of foreplay.

She fought down a blush, remembering Dorothea and her tent and that terribly comfy bed-beast the songstress slept on. What a day; first kisses, and now diplomatic meetings and small talk, the first time Edelgard had represented her country as Emperor in far too long. Dorothea had done all this work beforehand, with Edelgard a figurehead to provide her authority for her decisions; moving from figurehead to captain of the ship was a tall order, even with Dorothea's hand secretly on the wheel.

Edelgard hoped she was up to it, and even as she entered the tent- sparing a bow to the Duscur guards- she was dreading the small talk that was going to precede her offer. The number of genuine conversations Edelgard had with other people in the last half decade could be counted on both hands, and half of those had taken place over the last week, ever since she saw Byleth at Garreg Mach and the shock forced her awake. They were all with her Eagles, who'd known her before, when she was... unhurt.

( Dammit, the language was so clumsy for this; that'd be half the work once she got a hospital for the mind set up. They needed words for it, a language for healers and layfolk alike.)

What was she supposed to talk about? The weather? Or would that be offensive, since it was summer and everyone knew Faerghi melted like ice in any temperatures above freezing? Ask him how his marriage was? She didn't know if he'd adopted any kids, or... well, anything, really.

She'd have preferred a battle. She understood _that_.

As her eye adjusted to the tent's relative darkness, she saw that her and Petra were alone with Dimitri- well, his guards were there, but for royalty, that was practically being alone. Not as many guards as there had been, either- just those who were still alive. The Dragon Knight's squad had not been as lax as the rest of the Alliance forces.

_ But why were they so lax? Alliance troops are better disciplined than that, usually,_ she wondered, before dismissing the thought. _Focus, Edelgard. Remember- Dorothea said I didn't have to convince him here, just get him started thinking on it. Dorothea had a plan to come at his retainer later, and she's going to have Flayn preach to the Faerghi to get popular support going; this isn't all on your head. This is just the first tine of a multi-pronged plan to get them all to agree. Just... just do your part._

“ Greetings, Emperor Edelgard!” Dimitri said. He looked much like he had as a teenager, just... bigger, better featured. More settled, as though he had grown into himself. A great spray of fur topped a cloak that lay behind him on his chair's back; he was dressed simply enough, in blue and white tunic and pants of high quality. Royal elegance, simply stated, and not a burden on martial action; the very picture of a Faerghi warrior king.

Edelgard wondered what she looked like, in his eyes. He made Edelgard feel rather underdressed... but then again, that might just be her own nerves talking.

_Wonder if he thinks I'd make a good weapon, _she thought, remembering the soldiers' conversation, and she almost giggled out of sheer nervousness.

Her guards filed in behind her as she walked up to the table, though she didn't sit down; wasn't proper to sit until he offered her a seat, she remembered _that _lesson from her younger readings.

“ Greetings, King Dimitri,” she said, and then some thorny honesty inside, propelled by her internal distress at this meeting, provoked her into saying, “ It feels weird, to say that.”

“ It feels weird to hear it,” Dimitri said, tone more subdued. “ Even now. Feels weird to say Emperor Edelgard, too... but mostly because I thought you were dead.”

“ I was close,” Edelgard admitted. Her body had walked and talked and fought, but Edelgard had not been there for most of the last five years.

Dimitri nodded and offered her a seat with a broad wave of his hand.

( He was taking her words in a different way than she'd meant- he just assumed she was talking of the danger of her rebel guerilla lifestyle.)

“ Please, sit. I believe we have a meeting to attend,” Dimitri said, then motioned for his guards to leave. “ You may leave; I trust Edelgard.”

“ The same to you,” Edelgard told her bodyguards, who left more reluctantly. Petra paused, looking at her, and Edelgard nodded. Dorothea had been adamant they be alone for as much of this as possile.

The two royals were both silent as the soldiers filtered out, Petra remaining by Edelgard's side until the last moment. While they were leaving, the thought flickered through Edelgard's head of the one successful attempt at diplomacy she'd ever made- entreating Byleth to join the Black Eagles.

_I did that by being very honest and very blunt_, she thought to herself. _Maybe I'll just... do that again. If I try to lie or dress the truth up any, I'll trip myself up; just... be honest._

Petra, once the last guard was out, finally left, squeezing her shoulder before leaving with one last backwards glance as she stepped outside, reluctant to leave her again after such a short time reunited.

But at last, they were alone. For a long minute, they just sat there, the two royals alone, and it didn't feel like two nations meeting here; it felt like Garreg Mach, like Edelgard and Dimitri across the aisle at lunch, as they sat at the round table.

She wondered what he was thinking.

Finally, Dimitri flashed her a smile, bright as sunlight on snow. “ It's good to see you alive, sister.”

Edelgard's breath caught in her throat. She'd almost forgotten about _that _part in her worry over... over everything else. Dimitri clearly hadn't- but then again, she'd shouted it at him across a battlefield, it would be hard to miss.

“ So you heard that,” she said, mouth a bit dry. Smoking coffin, this couldn't _possibly _be the way Dorothea intended her to begin this conversation.

“ Hard not to,” Dimitri chided gently. “ Very dramatic, to yell it across a battlefield... I wasn't aware that you had ever thought about our accidental, erstwhile connection.”

“ I do, and often,” Edelgard admitted, wavering inside. The ashes were right there...

...But... he had greeted her with sister. Clearly he didn't think it was inappropriate.

“ Do you mind?” she asked.

“ We're siblings, so I don't see how it could be,” he said gently. “ Though I'm surprised- you never seemed to remember it while we were at Garreg Mach, yet you cared enough it was the first thing you yelled to me when my life was in danger.”

Dimitri had learned to pay attention in the last five years. Edelgard closed her eye and nodded, and she thought maybe that should be the end of it... but there was... so much to _say _about it... and she'd told herself to be blunt, and honest.

_Forgive me, Dorothea_, Edelgard thought, before she opened her mouth. _I am what I am._

“ I always wanted to call you brother,” Edelgard admitted. “ But I didn't... it is a thin connection. You know what happened to my family... well, everyone does. The curse of being an Emperor; even my most personal tragedies are public. And... it always... comforted me, to think I had at least _one _sibling left, that my _entire_ family wasn't dead, even if the lone survivor was a step-brother hundreds of miles away.”

She had never told anyone that, except Petra. Dimitri's eyes widened in surprise at her confession; Edelgard was glad she had the folder in her hands, otherwise they wouldn't know what to do with themselves... but even as it was, she clenched the papers tight, knuckles white.

“ But then we were at Garreg Mach, and to tell you that the mere idea of you had comforted me at my lowest points... I had no idea how to broach that subject with you,” she admitted. “ I didn't even _know _you, how could I say 'hey, do you know how important you are to me? Did you know the idea of you being my brother kept me stable?' There is no easy or good way to approach that conversation. Not even now.”

Edelgard paused, and glanced away.

“ I had no idea you felt that way,” he said softly.

She shrugged. “ You had no reason to know. It's... it's fine.”

“ No,” he said. “ but... I only wish I could have been there for you in more than spirit and thought. I had no idea it mattered to you this much...”

Edelgard shrugged. “ Like I said, I had no idea how to even _approach _the subject. You could hardly be blamed for your ignorance.”

“ I'd be glad to call you sister,” he said. “ You've saved me twice- once at Garreg Mach from that bastard Claude, and now here at Gronder from his minion. Calling you sister seems a fair trade.”

“ You've saved me, too,” she said. “ Not just from Seteth, but by merely being here you've saved me- Faerghus distracts Leceister, and so the Eagles have been safe in your shadow. If they were to fully commit, they'd kill us.”

“ Same to you,” Dimitri said. “ The Eagles and all your exploits are the stuff of legends, and it relieves pressure on the Kingdom. We've been saving each other for a long time, I think.”

She smiled. “ I guess so.”

“ I'm just sorry I cost you an eye,” he said. “ But... well, you lost more than an eye at Garreg Mach, and while I have no eyes to gift you, I _do _have a chance to return one of those other things you lost at the monastery.”

“ Hmm?” she said, as he rose up, and from behind himself opened a long wooden case.

“ Dedue found it by accident while we were fleeing the first assault of the Storm Caller's troops,” he said. “ I've kept it repaired; originally it was located at your gravestone.”

“ Gravestone?” Edelgard said, confused.

“ I had a graveyard made for you and the other Eagles,” Dimitri said quietly, as he withdrew something from the box. “ It's located in Fhirdiad. My way of remembering the brave heroes who fought Claude before anyone did; we had a ceremony for each of you. I felt... after everything... that there should be a memory of you, who had fought abomination before any of us knew it was even in our midst.”

He turned around.

“ And here you are now, _still _fighting... so have a gift, to make the next fight easier.”

With a smile, he held up a weapon Edelgard had never thought to see again, and she gasped.

“ Aymr!”

There it was, one of the great dragonbone weapons of the past, the weapon she had lost along with her eye fighting at the monastery, so long ago.

“ I thought you might like it,” Dimitri said, smiling as he walked around the table and handed it to her. She put her folder down on the table and rose up to take it in her hands, feel the weight of it again. “ I had it removed from the shrine in case we'd need it; I pulled out all the stops for the Kingdom Grand Army. I apologize for desecrating your grave like that.”

“ I... choose to forgive you for it, because I'm still alive,” Edelgard said, and both chuckled as she marveled at the weight and feel of her old axe, back in her hands. “ Goddess-in-Byleth, I've missed this thing.”

“ Glad to help,” Dimitri said, as he returned to his end of the table. “ Albeit- what's this business of the Goddess being in Byleth?”

..._Oh. _Dimitri didn't know about... about _any _of that. About Seiros, Solon's experiments, Byleth, Sothis...

..._Shit._

“ I... am not going to get into it,” Edelgard said. “ That's something Flayn is better equipped to explain, and we need to focus on the real reason I asked for this meeting... though I'll admit, part of me _did _just want to see you, brother.”

That word sent a happy feeling through her, warm and welcome.

“ I will allow Flayn to tell me, then,” he said... then shook his head. “ Just... one quick question first. I've been hearing rumors, but until I saw the dragons working for you, I didn't believe them... but now... well. I feel I must ask. Is Flayn _really _Saint Cethleann?”

“ Yes,” Edelgard said. “ She is.”

“ I... I don't know how to deal with that,” Dimitri admitted. “ It's just... it seems so impossible. I _knew _her. Flayn was just a really good, heavily scarred girl I knew, sweet and kind, liked fish. To think of her as _Saint Cethleann... _she sure doesn't resemble her portrait much, though they got her dragon form right.”

“ She's pretty annoyed about that,” Edelgard said, smiling. “ She doesn't know why they make her out to be an older woman; she was as old as you see her when she helped Nemesis, a teenager as her people record things.”

“ She cooked for me a few times, at Garreg Mach,” Dimitri said, laughing in disbelief. “ Most excellent fish dishes, and she never went heavy on the spice like you Adrestians do. Made meals you could eat without your mouth and your ass both burning afterwards. And I thought her sea-green hair had to mean _something _but I never guessed that she was _Saint Cethleann_, that... I almost fear my life has been taken over by a writer of chivalric romances, but the writer has no editor and a hankering for the dramatic.”

His grin was infectious; Edelgard smiled too, even as she kept glancing at Aymr, finally back in her hands after all this time. She'd thought Claude had it.

“ So...” Dimitri said. “ What _did _you come to discuss?”

Nerves threatened to overwhelm her again at the reminder of her real task... but Petra was returned to her, Aymr was back in her hand, Dimitri let her call him brother, and... and what use was worry, at this point?

_I am blunt, and honest, _Edelgard told herself, as she leaned Aymr against the table, gentle with her vicious weapon, and screwed her courage to the sticking place.

( A thing she missed about herself; she was brave, too.)

“ I'm about to make you the worst offer of your life,” she said to Dimitri. She paused to let him respond, and the silence dragged on for a long minute.

“ I... that's quite an opener,” he said.

“ I'm not gifted at diplomacy,” she said. “ And I don't like lying. So I'm simply going to lay it out like it is.”

“ I'm listening,” Dimitri said, and Edelgard slid her folder across the table to him.

“ What's this?” he asked, as he opened it to the first page, and looked down at the three words written there.

“ The Griffin Federation,” Edelgard said, echoing the words written there. “ A plan for after the war. A way to win the war and the peace _both. _ A plan to revive Adrestia and grant the Tribe of Cethleann land of its own, a place for her Nabatea to live with us in peace, the way they did before Sothis died and Seiros tried to strangle humanity. A Federation, to rule all Fodlan, each nation to have a voice in international politics, so something like this never happens again, and we can rebuild.”

Dimitri read that word, and looked down under it, at the flag- silver griffin on black background, under a sea-green star.

“ Why a griffin?” he asked. “ Those aren't common anywhere but Morfis.”

“ A Lion and an Eagle,” Edelgard said with a shrug. “ Seemed appropriate. The star's for Flayn's people.”

“ Okay,” he said. “ I... that doesn't _sound _like the worst offer I've ever heard...”

“ You haven't flipped the page,” Edelgard said dryly. “ Dimitri, I'll be blunt with you. This will be terribly expensive for Faerghus. You'll be doing most of the heavy lifting, economically; Adrestia's too devastated to contribute much at first, and Cethleann's tribe doesn't exactly have a lot of gold either. I'm sure I'm supposed to dress it up, or lie to you about that fact... but I'd rather be honest. I'm better at it. This deal will demand a lot of the Kingdom and not give much back until much later.”

“ We're already stretched thin by the war,” Dimitri said, as he turned the page and began scanning the proposal. “ Where do you propose these funds come from?”

“ A big chunk of it will be from Leceister,” Edelgard said. “ I think it's fair they pay for the harm they've caused, once this is done. But the rest is just going to be little things. Kingdom merchants not scalping Adrestia in its time of weakness. Kingdom experts to teach Adrestians arts and knowledge we've lost in the occupation. The Kingdom not robbing Adrestia blind in the process of helping reclaim it. No single major thing, save the war funds from Leceister; just a lot of little things.”

“ None of which will make me popular,” Dimitri said. “ Merchants will be salivating to sell goods expensively to your people, no soldier likes hearing they can't go looting, and I'm assuming you won't be able to pay the Kingdom experts very well, given your general lack of funds.”

“ Nope,” Edelgard said. “ In fact, I imagine it will make you _terribly _unpopular for a while. You can probably coast by on being the king who won the war, but it'll be a lot dicier than if you just let things play out without restraint.”

“...Okay,” Dimitri said, closing the proposal and looking Edelgard in the eye. “ You've told me a whole list of reasons why I _shouldn't _agree. Now... why _should _I?”

“ I could tell you about the benefits for Faerghus down the line,” Edelgard said, “ benefits of stable trading partners, lack of war on the continent, unity in the face of foreign invasion from Dagda or Almyra... but we both know the future's uncertain. We're talking about winning the war, but we don't know if we can; nothing says Rhea won't come down here and tear all of our heads off, that Claude won't have some scheme that renders us all dead as doornails. We might not even be able to take the damn Bridge. So I'll give you the only _real _reason you should do it.”

“ I'm listening,” he said.

“ It's the right thing to do,” Edelgard said, and shrugged. “ We both know it's the honorable thing to do. Faerghus _should _help Adrestia and Cethleann's Tribe. It should help Adrestia because we were the innocent victim of the invasion, and it should help Cethleann because it is the _Holy _Kingdom. There's no reason besides that I can offer.”

“ That's not much, to move a nation,” her brother said, softly, not unkindly.

“ Maybe not other nations,” Edelgard said. “ But you're _Faerghus._ I think honor is the only thing that might move you at all.”

Something strange moved in Dimitri's eyes at that, a surprised kind of consideration.

“ I'll have to think it over,” he said.

“ You wouldn't be a king if you didn't,” she said. “ I'm going to return to my own camp... but... Dimitri.”

“ Hm?” he said, still thinking, still with that strange look in his eyes.

“ Thank you,” she said. “ For Aymr... and for letting me call you kin.”

“ If I agree or not, we will still be siblings,” he said. “ Take care, sister.”

“ You too, brother.”

Edelgard emerged from his tent, and felt that she'd done as well as she could have.

Even Emperors could not ask for more than that.

( And in the little tent, Dimitri kept turning the pages, flipping the idea over and over in his mind like a coin.)

-

Ferdinand moved through the camp, paying little attention, his mind stuffed with revelation.

What a set of days it had been. Battle at Gronder Field, once more. He'd had so much deja vu; on this field where the Eagles had once participated in mock battle, they now fought a real war. Memories mixed oddly in the meat of his skull.

He'd led a charge then, too, but instead of corpses, he'd produced only bruises; they'd laughed it off afterwards, he'd eaten alongside the very troops whose positions he'd been charging. A feast they'd held, afterwards, and he still remembered the fun of it all, the thrill of victory undimmed by loss of any kind; even the Kingdom troops, who'd lost first, had been amused at getting so thoroughly thrashed, Dimitri apologetic to his friends even as Sylvain mocked him and Mercedes reassured him.

It was so clear in his head. The table, the food; he'd sat next to Hubert and Byleth, and the Alliance had sat next to them, friends back then, not the bitter foes they would become. Claude had blushed as Byleth complimented him for his tactics, the Alliance proving a hard nut to crack, and Hilda had been smug and amused- she'd taken down Petra and Hubert both when they approached her position, the Goneril woman as hard to conquer as one of the mountains in her home territory. It had taken Edelgard, Caspar and Raphael all three to take her down, an entire flock of Eagles had been needed to beat the biggest Doe into submission, and she'd still taken Raphael down with her.

Those memories had clashed, and badly, with the reality of what lay before him now; the dissonance nearly made him puke. Memories of feasting tables mixed with the stink of corpses and death-released shit, the laughter of his old classmates mixed with the screaming of the wounded and dying. White clouds dripping red blood...

...It seemed impossible, that he could have been that young boy, whom he vaguely remembers, as if it was a life someone else had lived. When he had been a nobleman in truth and not an exile on the run... when he'd been cheerful and dramatic, a silly sort of kid. A fop, if not in the traditional sense, and one that, at least, had been... not a _bad _person, just kind of annoying.

...So much had changed.

He walked amongst his own troops, the cavalry of the Eagles, a mish-mosh just like all the rest of the rebel force. Faerghi made up a slim majority, the knight-obsessed culture producing the finest horseman on the continent, but doughty Imperials and howling Sreng barbarians were the next two major groups, all under Ferdinand's command, the swift blade to compliment the heavy infantry hammer. Even the horses were a mixed bag; heavy Adrestian warhorses, slow and huge, were stabled next to slender Leceister chargers that looked juvenile next to their giant cousins, the Faerghus-bred beasts a happy medium in-between, not as slow as one, not as weak as the other.

Why, they even had a few of the Morfian breeds, with their odd faces, bulging eyes, and impossible speed, horses who seemed determined to make up for their bizarre faces with equally-bizarre speed and toughness. He'd heard it said that the horses had magic in their blood, that the mages of Morfis had woven greatness into their veins, something like Edelgard's sacred Crest.

Ferdinand didn't know about that; but he did know he liked the Morfian breeds. His own horse was one of those strange-looking equines, one he had named Chamomile after its gentle temperament... good horse. He'd went through a lot of good horses, in service to his Emperor...

Who, right now, was trying to convince Dimitri to spend an exorbitant amount of money to save Adrestia.

_Goddess-in-Byleth,_ Ferdinand prayed, and that was an odd feeling, how long had it been since he had prayed? _Please, help my Emperor. Help Edie. She needs it._

After a moment, considering his own turmoil, he finished with, _Help me, too._

( To Byleth and Sothis, Ferdinand's prayers felt like coals, dead a long time... but wanting to relight, there was still heat there, the fire had not gone completely cold. Not just yet.)

He hated to pray for himself, after so long not praying at all... but he couldn't help it. The news he'd received was like a match in his hands... he tried to hold it, but it burned him. He walked, aimless, just wandering the Eagles' camp, as though some part of him thought maybe he'd find an answer if he just walked long enough.

His father had died better than he had lived.

His father... so many fights, so many arguments, but the opposite of how it _should _go. A father should admonish his son not to do evil; a son should never have to admonish his father to do good. Ferdinand had grown sick of fighting with his own father on clear-cut matters of honor and justice; he had grown used to the sound of his father's contempt, and met it with his own contempt in turn. He had come to the understanding that his father was a bad man, and that was the simplest and the most complicated truth he'd ever known, simultaneously.

Garreg Mach had been a sweet reprieve from the constant fighting, and serving Edelgard against the Storm Caller had been even better. It had been something _good,_ something pure and simple and _good_. The Storm Caller was a monster; and they fought him in defense of holiness.

He hadn't expected that, but he had _welcomed _it, all the same. Just like he'd not expected Edelgard; he'd thought to find a rival in Edelgard, and instead found a humble, self-effacing girl, one who had impressed him terribly. He had seen her kindnesses towards Bernie and the others, the way she would help anyone, the way she never seemed to notice her own greatness. She'd told _him _he was great, and never taken the word for herself; and in doing so, she'd bowled him over, and won his loyalty.

Instead of a rival, he'd found an Emperor worth following, and a friend. Edelgard had been the world's shortest sun, and they had revolved around her, happy to be planets in her orbit, to share in her glory and her passion to do the right thing.

Then the mask had fallen off Claude's face and the scales had fallen off Ferdinand's eyes and the next five years... had happened. Deprivation and want and the enemy, trampling all over his people, again and again and again...

And now this. His father, whom he had been so disappointed in, had died a hero of Adrestia, he had died noble and true.

...Ferdinand didn't know what to do with that. Not really.

But he felt like he _should _do something... but... what? Did he forgive him? His father had not been a good man. Did his ending make up for it? _Why _had he done it? Had he done it to be good, or just out of spite? What had motivated the greatness of his last acts?

( _Did he think of me, before the end? _some part of Ferdinand wondered, the part that would always be the man's son, first and foremost.)

He rubbed the great mane of hair he'd ended up with; he hadn't even bothered cutting it all these years, a fact he felt vaguely chagrined about, now that he was... awake.

...The last five years... it almost didn't seem real.

Nowhere was that unreality more apparent than when he looked around himself again, and found his wandering feet had crossed into the cavalry archer's part of the camp; it was near his own, since he ran the heavy cavalry, and horses of all kinds had similar needs, save the Sreng horses, which needed meat for some Goddess-forsaken reason. They had to stable those by themselves or they'd try to eat the others.

( Cannibal horses. What a fucking thing to deal with.)

But the unreal part wasn't the horses- it was Bernadetta. She was reading over a list of requirements and talking with Caspar, a smile on her face... and how strange that was. He remembered Bernadetta, how she had been before all this, the girl so hurt and shy that Edelgard had taken meals to her and sat quietly outside her door.

It had been a thing almost too sweet to see; he remembered commiserating with Lorenz over how noble he found the whole affair, how telling it was of Edelgard's true character, no matter how she might dispute it.

( Lorenz, Goddess, _Lorenz._ He was going to have to kill him. Lorenz had been one of his best friends and he was going to have to kill him. Goddess damn the Golden Deer... and Goddess damn Ferdinand himself, for the terrible _regret _he felt at what he'd have to do.)

That same girl... Fearless Bear now, he'd heard her called. Fearless Bear, who rode into danger, who never flinched; he should know, he'd fought alongside her for five years. There was no cavalry charge she would not commit to, no fight so desperate that Bernadetta von Varley, now just Bernadetta, would not charge in. Where angels feared to tread, Bernie charged in, and from the jaws of defeat, tugged loose victory. Like Caspar, that was why they hung out, the blue-haired berserker and the shy archer, sharing in a mutual love of violence and combat...

A person could change in an instant, and a span of five years had many such instants inside of it. From the shy, stuttering, scared girl had emerged, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, this powerful, quiet woman...

He wondered if she knew his father had once thought she'd make Ferdinand a good wife. His father had tried to arrange that marriage, and would have succeeded, save that Ferdinand had heard such rumors of her that he'd begged and pleaded until his father agreed to drop the matter. His father had hated Varley, anyway, so when his son told him that his daughter was supposed to be a monster, making curse-dolls in private, his father had dropped the matter.

( Why had he agreed? Had he truly agreed only because he hated Varley... or because he loved his son, and wanted him to be happy? He had agreed with Ferdinand in so little while alive... but he'd died a hero. Why? He'd have expected his father to turn traitor, not... not to be _good_. He didn't understand, not why his father had relented before, and not why his father had died so well. He didn't understand.)

She noticed him a moment later; he'd been staring. She flinched when she caught him looking.

“ Ferdie! Oh hey!” she said, a bit nervous. “ Uhh, what are you... staring at me for?”

...Okay, not _everything _had changed. Ferdinand sighed and averted his gaze. Caspar turned and gave him an eyebrow.

“ Sorry, Bernadetta,” he said. “ I... was thinking, and didn't realize I was staring. My apologies- and to you too, Caspar. I... I was thinking.”

She shrugged. “ It's okay,” she said, recovering faster than she ever would have in her younger days. Awkward still, but things _had _changed for her in the last five years. “ I... what's on your mind?”

“ Bernie, come on,” Caspar said, giving her a look. “ You know what he's thinking about. Petra's news, remember?”

“ Oh!” she squeaked. “ Sorry, Ferdie. I... didn't mean to pry at you.”

Ferdie. Dorothea's nicknames were like a benevolent plague, infecting all her friends.

“ It's fine,” he said, waving off her concern. “ I apologize; I'll leave.”

He left, still trapped in his own thoughts... and did not see Bernadetta watch him go, with sympathetic eyes.

-

Dorothea sat in her tent, reading reports on the goods they'd taken from the Leceister supply train, and Raphael stood next to her, holding the reports she hadn't read yet. As she finished the current report and put it to the side, he broke his silence as he handed her the next one.

“ So I'm gonna ask a question, boss,” Raphael said.

“ Go for it,” Dorothea said.

“ Why didn't you prepare Edie better? Dimitri's gonna laugh her out of his tent,” he said.

Dorothea grinned. “ No he won't,” she said. “ I have a plan.”

“ Blackmail?” Raphael said, and Dorothea laughed.

“ No,” she said. “ Nothing so complicated. Dimitri's a Faerghi. Faerghi love honesty and bluntness, and they expect Adrestians to talk; Edie's gonna walk in there, feeling awkard, and she's going to be honest with him. She's going to be blunt. Her passion and her nature mean she'll come off as the soul of honesty to him. He also owes her his life twice over, she's his sister, and the Eagles just dramatically saved his army. Faerghi _love _that kind of thing, it smacks of all their stories of their own origins; if anything could convince them to agree, that'll do it. And since Faerghi hate going back on their agreements, _if _he agrees, then we win- they'll hold to it. Faerghus doesn't break deals. If I'd prepared her, she'd come off as lying; he'd have sensed the artifice. Sending her in unprepared was _vital_.”

“ You... sound exceptionally confident it'll work,” Raphael said, and Dorothea gave him a smug grin.

“ I know my Edie better than anyone,” she said. “ I came up with it once I realized she was truly _back_. And I know Faerghi well, too; I was actually looking at them for husbands, back at Garreg Mach, before the Storm Caller and... everything. I was going to pick Sylvain; he could have Felix on the side and me as his wife.”

“ _Sylvain?_” Raphael said.

“ He was always better than he acted,” Dorothea said, and anything further was interrupted as the guard at the door poked his head inside.

“ Lady Edelgard,” he said, “ and Lady... Petra wish to enter.”

The Adrestian pondered for a moment.

“ What _is _the appropriate address for her? I don't think anyone told me,” he said.

“ Call her Lady Petra,” Raphael said. “ She's royalty too. Unless she says otherwise.”

“ Got ya,” the guard said. “ Anyway, they wanna see you, Lady Dorothea.”

“ Show them in,” Dorothea said. The duo entered a moment later.

“ Well, I made a mess of it,” Edelgard said, handing the axe in her hands to Petra before flinging herself face-first onto the lumpy mattress beast in the corner, emotionally exhausted. She spoke up, face down in what had, once, been a Leceister officer's favorite pillow. “ Hopefully Dimitri finds the mess amusing enough that he signs it.”

“ Oh, I think you did better than you think,” Dorothea said, as Raphael was distracted by the weapon in Petra's hands.

“ Hey, is that Aymr?”

-

Dimitri looked over the papers again. He'd have to have Felix go through them- actually, he wanted Ashe and Dedue to go over them as well. Felix could figure out the political ramifications; Ashe and Dedue could go through the financial papers, see if the prices suggested were too skinflint, and adjust them to make sure Faerghus wasn't being ripped off. Ashe would also know what Faerghus had and didn't have... and he'd better talk with Sylvain, too. He had a good head for politics, somewhat despite himself, and his advice might be valuable.

Dimitri noticed some wording that was ambiguous, and wrote it down in a small journal he'd had a guard fetch. Notes and annotations already filled that journal; he'd get Felix to work on a second draft, with the language they'd prefer inside of it. He had secretaries, they could get something typed up fairly quickly.

( _That _was still weird to think about, five years into the war, that Felix not only had secretaries, but used them.)

But for all the work they'd do to modify this, and make it fairer to Faerghus... one thing didn't change.

Dimitri intended to sign it.

He could not rightfully claim credit for the victory at Gronder they'd won, no matter that he'd still _take _that credit, if for no other reason than to boost the morale of his men. It had been the best of luck that Edelgard had been there, that the Black Eagles had pit themselves to the cause of the Blue Lions, and saved them.

But this... he could claim credit for this. This was something he could _choose_, and it would be on him, for good or ill... but that wasn't really _why _he'd do it.

For all the counsel he would take of his friends in making this decision, in doing it the way it should be done... it was Ingrid, unbending, honorable Ingrid, who he would take after the most. Ingrid, who held to the highest tenets of chivalry, no matter what... who had been a guidepost for Dimitri for five years.

He had never told her, but when he was lost, he asked himself what she would do, and tried to follow through. Not always; he was not made of the same stuff as Ingrid, because nobody was. Ingrid was made of something greater than steel, stronger than stone, harder than the ice of the glaciers that dominated the great mountains. He had _seen _her wounds; they would have killed anyone else, but Ingrid treated them as annoyances.

And Ingrid, in his position, would have signed this paper.

A stupid decision. No question. Felix was going to tell him as much, he was sure. It would be expensive, to offer these goods to Adrestia, and the only reward would be some semblance of market value and Adrestian goodwill, an ephemeral thing that would fade quickly... there _were _benefits, but Edelgard was right, they were far off and depended on many factors.

But it was the right thing to do, and what else was honor, but doing the right thing? Faerghus committed so many stupidities, in the name of honor. Fathers abandoned their families in disgrace; soldiers died as they were commanded to, following their leaders, right or wrong. People killed themselves for honor, or killed others for it.

So... why not do something _grand _for once? If honor demanded so much foolishness of them, why not do something foolish and _magnificent?_ Why not rebuild a nation, all for the sake of honor? So many people died for honor; it would be nice to make something for it, instead, it would be nice for something to owe its life to honor and not its death.

It seemed the honorable thing to do; Edelgard had been right. Adrestia had not caused this suffering, and did not deserve what happened to it. Cethleann and her people did not deserve the harm done to them, either. He should restore them both.

Who cared that it would be expensive? Who cared that Faerghus was positioned to take the entire continent, or at least, to hem in the Alliance at the Bridge and steal Adrestia's already-stolen land for themselves, thieves of thieves... they could do it... but it wouldn't be honorable, and what was Faerghus without its honor?

( Honor, that drove Faerghus soldiers to die in battles they could retreat from; honor, that now demanded justice for Adrestia. Much harm does Faerghus' conception of honor do its people; but few things are wrong always, few things have _no _virtue whatsoever, and to every thing, there is a season.)

Dimitri, who knew not what future historians would call him, who would hear himself called the Good King in his own lifetime, flipped the notebook back to the first page, looked down at the flag of the Federation, and smiled, looking at this new thing he was going to help make.


	12. Interlude III: Of Knights and Eagles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back! Don't worry, I abandon nothing; now we go to hear from many people, knights both Dragon and Faerghi, and Eagles known and unknown.

**Interlude III**

**Of Knights and Eagles**

Cichol woke up an hour later in great pain.

His throat was sore, aching- and there was something in his lungs, even as he awoke he was turning, spitting, water and something not quite vomit flowing out of his insides. He drew in a hacking breath between each desperate expulsion, forcing air into his lungs. He reached up to use a hand he no longer had, before the pain at his wrist's end, forgotten in his desperate need for air, reminded him of the truth.

He felt... lighter, and after a moment, as his head cleared, he realized why; he had no armor. His underclothes were gone, too; he was in a simple pair of pants and a white shirt, which he'd definitely not had on him before he fell in the river.

“ You know, I have to say... I almost let you drown.”

The voice pulled him up out of his own actions and into the world. He was in a tent; red cloth, decorated with a really, _really _badly painted Eagle. In black, of course. 

( Black Eagles. He was  _sick _ of that goddamn symbol, after five years seeing it on every human building he passed, on the armor of every human he killed, on the insides of helmets of secret traitors, the pictograph sketch of a prayer.)

He had been on a small cot; his nose vaguely registered the scent of vulneraries and antiseptics. His stump had been bandaged and cleaned, though it still looked rather nasty... what had the Faerghi King coated his spear in? Some kind of poison?

“ Still, I suppose you're more useful alive than dead, so congratulations; you're in the land of the living. For now.”

He turned his head, his mind identifying the speaker his ears were hearing, but unable to _believe _it...

“ Man...” he coughed again, spluttering for a second before resuming. “ Manuela...?”

“ You  _do _ remember me,” his once-peer drawled sarcastically. “ I'm flattered.”

She stood before him, looming over him- which was odd to see, given he was taller han her, but everybody's taller than a man trying not to puke his guts out. She... looked almost exactly the same as she used to.

...No, on closer inspection, that was wrong. The differences were small, smaller than they usually were for humans after a half-decade, but there, and in more than her stern, angry expression. Her eyes were sharper, clearer; not so fuzzy, not so sad.

( He hadn't cared much for his human “peers” while infiltrating the monastery, but he'd still paid attention to them, and the sorrow in Manuela was a song they both knew by heart.)

But he didn't see that in her now. Hard eyes, looking at him with pursed lips and a deep frown; her body was firmer, slimmer. More muscular, more defined, less fat on her bones, though her new clothes made that harder to notice than her old clothes would have. Her outfit was no longer the loose outfit made to entice the wealthy, but soldier's gear, a practical brigandine over pants, all in dark Adrestian blacks, highlighted gently with red- and of course, with the fucking eagle symbol on them, the spread wings of the Empire-That-Was.

A sword at her side, drawn, and the lightest glimmers of magic in her left hand, said she knew well how dangerous he was, and stood ready to fight.

...He didn't feel much like fighting. Not after...

(_I'm going to die and I've done it all wrong_)

He sighed.

“ Why am I not dead?” he asked.

“ If you're asking why you didn't drown, it's because one of my rebels pulled you out of the river,” Manuela said. “ Monica was out fishing, and suddenly there was a tug on her line, and there you were, hooked like a fish. She had no idea who you were; just someone she pulled out of the river. Your uniform doesn't have any Leceister or Seiros markings, after all, just big, grim blackness. She thought you might be an Adrestian, given our colors.”

Huh. That seemed... surprisingly improbable.

( The grim dragon haunting him, pulling Monica's hook just a little farther out, letting it hook on Cichol's clothes; not yet, he didn't get to die just yet.)

Cichol grunted as the stump on his arm suddenly throbbed with pain. Mother's teeth. He rephrased his question.

“ Why have you kept me alive?”

Manuela nodded. “ Well, executing you _was _my first instinct... but I thought I'd question you first. Standard procedure.”

He nodded. He knew how this went.

...And he just couldn't work up the will to _care_.

“ So...” he said. “ What do you want to know?”

Manuela raised an eyebrow and cocked her head to the side. “ I... well, that's a bit more helpful than I expected. No ranting about my human failings, no villainous diatribes, no theatrical taunts? Or at least stony silence?”

He shook his head. “ I... find I don't care anymore.”

(the river, the water washing over him, going to die, to die and... what was he going to tell his creator, when he reached her? His pain didn't _justify _this, his life flashed before his eyes and he cannot justify it anymore, even to himself...)

“ Wish you'd decided that five years ago,” Manuela snarked. “ First... what were you doing in the Airmid? You looked half-dead.”

“ Drowning,” he responded.

“ Hilarious,” the rebel leader deadpanned, but Cichol kept talking.

“ I had fallen from the Great Bridge...” he said, then trailed off. What was he going to say? Speak of Lorenz' betrayal, obviously... but the Gloucester lord had never been a deft poisoner. Even when he'd killed his father, he'd just stabbed the man, from what Cichol had heard (and admittedly he paid little attention to the world around him.)

All that poison meant Claude, probably; he'd always favored it. Apparently the Deer were going to betray Seiros, or perhaps Claude had some greater plan in mind, though Cichol could not see how losing the Bridge was anything but a catastrophe for Leceister and its draconic mistress.

But all that speculation felt like... so much _effort_, right now.

“ Everyone on the Bridge is dead,” he said. He'd stick with the truth. Simpler. Easier. “ Poison. Lorenz poisoned everyone on the Bridge. All the Leceister forces are dead.”

He wasn't sure why he was telling her this. She was the enemy, and was going to kill him when this was done... but... did it even _matter?_ He had done wrong, an understanding that was not sharp inside him but dull, like a weight pressing down on his chest. He had thought his last thoughts, what he had _thought _were his last thoughts, and they were full of sorrow and regret, in his last moments he had come clean with himself and admitted he had done wrong.

He _knew _he had done wrong, and that realization had pierced the veil of rage and grief and Mother-damned _stupidity _that had clouded his thoughts for long centuries.

And there was nothing to _do _with that information, with that revelation. Even if he somehow fought his way out of this camp... what in the _world _could atone for sins like this? Even grueling death would not, but... well, it at least had the benefit of having an _end_. He could not imagine an end for atonement, he would be pushing that boulder up the hill forever and ever without end, amen.

...Which was a form of cowardice, but he was so tired at the moment.

Lost in his own thoughts, he had missed Manuela staring at him in silence for a few long moments, disbelief on her face.

“ I... you expect me to believe that_ Lorenz Hellman Gloucester_, who has lived half a decade in the service of Rhea, just...”

“ Believe what you want,” he huffed at the human, and grimaced as his arm throbbed in pain. “ What other explanation do you have for my presence in the river? I fell off the Bridge to try and save myself from the choking poison in the air.”

“ That's two day's travel from here,” Manuela said. “ How could you be carried so far-”

“ I'm more durable than you humans are,” he answered. “ And the Airmid is a swift river.”

“ ...Myrddin is empty?” Manuela asked. Cichol nodded his head.

“ Save for the corpses.”

Manuela shook her head, but an expression of surprise- and something else, something Cichol was too tired to parse out- grew on her face anyway.

“ Did... did Lorenz make it off?” she asked. Cichol shrugged.

“ I was busy choking to death and then falling; I do not know. I presume he had a plan to survive; though we had cornered him, right before the poison fell. Perhaps he was trying to kill us alongside himself.”

She nodded, then, quieter, “ Have you been south of the Bridge?”

“ Yes,” he said. “ Just two days ago, at Gronder.”

“ Gronder?” she asked. “ What happened there?”

“ A Leceister army was devoured by the Kingdom... and by Adrestian Black Eagles,” he said, mouth twisting into a frown as he said the last few words. “ A stunt of Lorenz's; on review, the signs were there, but I hadn't paid attention to them. The Kingdom army- a vast one, something Dimitri threw together- and the Adrestian rebels fought us. _Real _Black Eagles, not your little resistance.”

“ The real... you mean the stories are true?” Manuela said. “ We hear them... but they can't be true. Edelgard...”

“ Edelgard is most real,” Cichol said. “ She is alive. It was while I was attempting to kill her that Dimitri hacked off my hand. Then I was forced from the field by the arrival of her fellows.”

“ Did...” Manuela paused, licked her lips. “ Did you see Dorothea Arnault among them?”

He debated being cruel for a second, before a feeling he almost didn't recognize washed over him- _shame_. This woman was asking after her daughter; even as dull as he had been to the world, he had recognized the care she'd held for the girl back at Garreg Mach. He knew a parent's duties, even if he had failed them for a thousand years.

(_Cethleann_... no, no, put it away, too much, too tired to think of it, of what he'd done to his little girl all these years. Of all the failed parents on the continent, he was the worst father of the bunch; even Varley in Enbarr had not been so poor a parent, if only because he had not failed his duties for so long a time.)

“ She is alive,” he said. “ She is alive and well; she was throwing thunderbolts at my soldiers the last I saw of her.”

Manuela let out a sigh, a release of pressure like steam from a teapot, worries and fears fleeing before it.

“ She's alive?” she asked again, just wanting to hear him say it one more time.

He nodded again. “ Alive and well.”

A smile tugged at her lips before she reasserted herself. “ I... we'll be keeping you a few days for information. If you behave, when it's done, we'll be quick with killing you. If not, well, you still have another hand.”

“ I understand,” he said. Manuela turned around.

“ I've got people watching you. Don't try to escape... I... I'll be back.”

She stepped out, leaving Cichol alone to brood with his thoughts and his aching wrist.

( _Cethleann..._)

He had done so much wrong by her... no way to make up for it. How could anything ever be the same again? He'd pissed away all his happiness in his grief, he'd grieved too much, he'd found his wife murdered and Seiros' warcry had reverberated in his heart until there was nothing left...

...His wife would hate him, for what he has done, the same way his daughter must hate him.

Cichol ached, and curled up on himself, his soul a stone inside him.

( The grim ghost gleefully spun around him, unseen, hiding in his shadow. He barely had to torment Cichol; the man tortured himself. He'd drag this out a while longer yet; it was too fun, to see him suffer.)

-

Manuela stepped out of the prisoner's tent and into her hidden camp of rebels, the northernmost roost of Black Eagles in all of Fodlan. It was a small thing when seen in the darkness that had just fallen, just a few simple dots of campfire lights in the late evening and early night. The fires were a risk, but not a large one; they were hidden now near the Airmid river in a gentle valley, a tiny dip in the land that hid them from prying eyes on land or in the river. By air...

Well, that was what Tiki had just returned from guarding. At one end of the camp, in a cleared space, the great gangly wind dragon was landing, her wings blowing a soft breeze through the camp. She melted for a moment, reshaping into the awkward teenage form that was her human face, already reporting to Monica what she'd seen even as the rest of her was taking shape; the red-headed Adrestian woman was nodding, but not showing any reaction.

_Nothing much to report, then_, Manuela thought. Good. A peaceful night was always a good one. She still had people standing guard shifts, of course, and Tiki would go out later after she'd eaten and slept a bit, but for now they were safe.

Manuela walked to her tent, taking in a quick glance at her forces as she passed them, unconsciously checking them over the way any commander learned to do (or died, war being the school of hardest knocks.) There wasn't much to look over. This was no great Adrestian axe or Faerghus spear, but a Leceister arrow, a pinprick to bother the devil with. As Cichol had said, not _real _Black Eagles.

( She'd adopted the name from the stories they heard, once she got her rebel band going proper; she'd originally planned to name them Dragonslayers, but the Eagle symbol worked too well. Hell, she was an Adrestian, she had a right to it.)

Things seemed to be in order; archers were checking bowstrings, her small cavalry compliment tending their horses, most of the rest of the camp settling down for the night and doing the little work of any camp.

Her officers were doing much the same. Her two Dagdan captains, the twin heads of her infantry, were in fine high spirits, Misako cleaning her gauntlets as Kyoko checked out her kanabo, talking cheerfully as they ate twice their body weight in food.

( That was fine; they also killed twice their share of enemies, even once tag-teaming a dragon to death. They claimed to have grown up on the mean streets of some riverside city in the south before moving to Derdriu a fateful year before the invasion; Manuela couldn't imagine what a shithole it must have been, to teach the two to be so deadly.)

Her cavalry captain was in his tent- probably still mourning the horse he'd lost last month. Manuela thought him an overdramatic sort, and coming from a former opera singer, that was _saying _something; but he was a good leader and able rider, when he wasn't being... himself.

As for her archers- she waved at the man who led them as she passed.

“ Lord Edmund,” she said, giving him a nod.

“ Lady Casagranda,” he replied, as formally as if they were at an evening tea. Good man. Shame about his adoptive daughter... but perhaps that had been decided long before he met the poor, frightened girl. He'd told her of Marianne's story... her parents had been killed by an overzealous researcher, who feared their connection to Seiros.

Maybe some part of Marianne had never forgotten, never forgiven; maybe when Seiros returned, she had went to her side, in hopes of gaining revenge on a society that had cast her kin out and murdered her parents.

Who knew?

She slipped into her tent, which had all of her worldly possessions- mostly clothes and maps and weapons at this point. She hadn't woken up after Garreg Mach with anything but a single note, her clothes and a single iron sword, alongside a headache; the note was burned, the clothes had long ago been shredded into bandages, the sword had since been broken on someone's armor, and the headache had faded, so she really didn't have anything left.

Burned though it was, she still recalled the words on that note.

( _You were great, Teach. I'm sorry. Go home and be safe. Love, the Golden Deer._)

She'd been drugged before the great battle and moved; apparently Claude had that much concern. She'd woken up in the Alliance in an empty house along the Airmid. Bastards could have left her with some gold, at least.

She sat in her chair, and cleared her mind, to think of what Cichol had said.

...Dorothea was alive.

( _My daughter is alive._)

The thought alone was like a sun inside her skull, and it blinded her to everything else- so she shunted it off, put it into some dark place inside her, where she could take it out after her work was done for the moment. That bright spark of happiness and hope was too much, she'd have to look at it when she had time, touch that joy when it was safe to do so.

Other matters first. The Bridge was open... if true... perhaps an opportunity. She had been trapped in Leceister for five years, partly by choice- she could do greater work here than she could in the south- but to some extent by practical matters as well. She could probably get her people across the Airmid in boats- there weren't that many of them, and the sole manakete they had could fly- but boat crossings were slow, and Allied patrols went up and down the Airmid on just a regular enough schedule to make it risky. Her rebels were mostly Leceisterfolk, too, and would not have wanted to cross back into Adrestia; many of them were at her side only because she offered some hope of kicking out the Church of Seiros, proud mountain folk who had looked at the foreign invader and her foreign religion and decided they'd go down fighting before they submitted.

No, Adrestia had been closed to her for five long years. She couldn't go home again; just another thing she carried, like the open wound in her heart that was the question _Is my daughter alive?_

Dorothea... if she was alive...

(_I might get a chance to tell her I think of her as my own, instead of dancing around it like I did for years_)

She shut that door again, the light peeking out around the edges. No. Other matters first. Dorothea and everything else would have to wait.

...But thinking of Dorothea brought Manuela's mind to Garreg Mach, to that fateful year of 1180 where so much had happened, all right under her nose. Her old friend, guilt, accompanied by its drinking buddy, shame, wandered their way into her mind, the way they always did whenever she thought of her ill-fated teaching career. Other people at Garreg Mach had been fooled by the Golden Deer, but nobody had been a bigger fool than Manuela; she had literally taught the Storm Caller, she had seen the little bastard every day and never even guessed.

The old thoughts resurfaced, from a door harder to keep locked than the one that kept thoughts of her daughter quiet for now.

(_If I hadn't been so focused on getting a man... if I'd gone out drinking less, paid more attention... could I have stopped this? Are the last five years my fault, did I do this, can the Goddess forgive me for not seeing the monster before my eyes?..._)

...She must have been the worst professor in _history_. The devil himself had attended her class and she'd seen none of the details. More fool her.

But those were old thoughts and old guilt and old shame, familiar as the feel of a bottle in her hand had once been; she pushed them away, with the same strength she'd found that led her to giving up alcohol, strength those very feelings had lent her.

( She didn't admit it to anyone... but part of the reason she'd taken up the rebel yell was because, if she hadn't, the guilt would have torn her apart. She had looked a long time at a sword she'd found in the weeks after Garreg Mach, and while she made the choice to hoist it high, for a time... for a time she had considered falling on it.)

Of her former class, Lorenz wouldn't be the first Deer to betray Seiros. Leonie's face floated up, unbidden, the first Deer to turn her face from evil... She'd found them, years ago, but instead of being at the head of a rebel-hunting army she'd been alone and weaponless, her belly just beginning to show the child she carried inside her.

...Hell, that child had _been _Lorenz's, according to Leonie. She'd ridden up and asked for help, brave and brazen as you please, unafraid despite the fact Manuela had almost ordered her troops to just kill her. A Deer before the very professor they'd all fooled? Manuela's rage had been nearly blinding.

But Monica had begged Manuela to at least hear her out, and she'd listened to her second in command. Leonie had told her so many things, and of what she sought in the northwest... even convinced her, despite herself, to assist. Manuela had given her food and supplies and even a check-up before sending her on her way, hoping she'd find Cethleann's old tribe... but Manuela had heard nothing from her since.

Died on the road, Manuela suspected. Or found nothing and was running rebels of her own up in the northwest; that area was too war-torn for Manuela, and too favored by Ignatz, the smartest of Claude's Deer. She preferred the south and east, particularly the former House Ordealia's territory; Lorenz was smart, too, but focused on Faerghus, and while Lysithea technically was lord and master over the territories Manuela roamed, her transformation had rendered her incapable of fulfilling the duties of her office.

( Manuela had seen her, a time or two, flying overhead with Hilda on her back on some hunt or another; the former songstress suspected, privately, that Lysithea had tried to betray Seiros too, that the brave little girl she remembered had tried to do the right thing... and paid for it by being turned forcibly into Hilda's mount. She could not otherwise explain the horror of the witch's transformation; no servant, however fanatical, would become _that_.)

...If the Bridge was open, and Gronder Field taken... the Eagles would be coming north. Adrestian Eagles, the ones the campfire stories were about; the names running through her mind like glittering jewels. Merciful Linhardt, Red Raphael- her Leceister troops liked that one, for obvious reasons, stories of the hulking barbarian warrior from their homeland a bonfire favorite- the True Emperor, who had fought this evil before anyone else even knew it was present.

Wise Dorothea, whose stories Manuela could not help but listen to, even as fear for her girl overwhelmed her spirit.

...She should go, if Cichol's information was correct. She should at least see if his word was to be trusted; if the Bridge was taken, and armies of Faerghus and Adrestia coming to hold it... they'd need her. They'd need someone who knew the way to Derdriu, who knew of hidden routes and villages that were secret rebels, of mountain clans that hid drawings of great black wings under cabin floorboards.

“ Boss?” a voice from nearby, dragging her out of her head. Monica, poking her head in, the young woman who had, by dint of effort, somehow become her second in command over the heads of multiple more experienced parties.

“ Yes?” Manuela said.

“ What did the prisoner say, boss?” she asked.

“ A lot of things,” Manuela said.

“ Do you trust any of it?”

...Hmm. If she hadn't been so focused on Dorothea, she might have thought to ponder the veracity of it all first.

Still... She was used to liars from both the Mittelfrank and from simply living in Enbarr... and this man did not seem the type.

“ I do,” she said. “ But let us check his most outrageous claim first. He says the Great Bridge of Myrddin is clear.”

“ Wait, really?” Monica said. Manuela nodded.

“ We're going to check it out,” she said. “ Quiet and careful... but if it's true, then we may be meeting southern allies soon. We head for the Great Bridge of Myrddin.”

Monica simply shrugged; decisions about leadership weren't her purview. She was an Adrestian like Manuela- probably half of why she'd picked her as a retainer- and where Manuela said go, all Monica had to do was figure out how they'd get there.

She left, to go prepare, and Manuela, content to know that the work was going to be done, finally let herself open that little door in her head, and bask in the warmth of the thought inside.

_Dorothea... my daughter... is alive._

A single tear ran down her cheek, tracing a smile on her lips as it passed.

-

In the south, that same Dorothea was busily enacting her schemes. Orders went out. The Kingdom was in agreement; the treaty was signed. The Griffin Federation has hatched out of its egg, no longer merely an idea in Dorothea's head, but something real. The stormsong general could not describe her relief when the message came, alongside a copy of her document signed by Dimitri in a great looping hand; it had worked, save that it felt like a mountain had been lifted off of her back.

She had bet so much on this... but the dice had landed just right. The wheel stops on her number, the dealer draws for her an ace and a ten.

She'd done it.

The outcast bastard daughter of a nobleman had rearranged the face of all Fodlan, and she allowed herself an exhausted laugh, for a moment she was not the great strategist and leader of Adrestia's greatest rebel army, but merely a very tired woman, resting after great deeds were done.

But then she went back to work. The agreement was the peak of the mountain she was climbing, but now she had to come back down the other side, and not fall while doing so. Flags, banners, and sigils were sent out to both camps, alongside tabards and insignia patches to sew into clothing and even painted shields, all things Dorothea had ready and prepared months ahead of time; this had not been a plan of moments, after all, but something she'd been thinking about for years, only finalizing in recent days. They went everywhere, Adrestian black outlining Faerghus white and all mingled with the sea-green star of Sothis guiding the way, and soon nearly everyone amongst the camps were wearing the newborn Federation's colors alongside their own, to Dimitri's bewilderment and Felix's bemused admiration.

Faerghi, who liked heraldry and other accouterments of chivalry, were eager early adopters of the symbols, particularly since Dorothea asked them to fly the flags underneath the Kingdom's flag; only over joint meetings would the Griffin fly highest. The humility she displayed appealed to the Faerghi's strong national pride, and soon the Kingdom Grand Army was dressed in Dorothea's choice of colors and flying her flag, all the while thinking it was their own idea.

Her Black Eagles, ironically, were somewhat more resistant; they'd never had a standard uniform before, save the painted black wings, and it was strange to realize that one reason they never had enough seamstresses or tailors was because Dorothea had been poaching them for this specific project. They did finally put them on- orders were orders, and Dorothea's orders had kept them alive years past when they should have been feeding worms- but there was grumbling. Hanzo, the cook, took to wearing his tabard as a combined mask/headband affair, to Edelgard's amusement and Dorothea's annoyance.

Not that she got much of a chance to yell at him; the cooks were busy. A great commemorative feast was to be held, the soldiers to eat together, celebrating the birth of this new thing; tensions would be high between the Faerghi and the dragons in the Eagles, but Dorothea had plans in place to smooth it over, to make sure only the more cool-headed dragons brushed shoulders with the Faerghi, working with Felix to ensure the more cool-headed Knights among the hot-blooded northerners met the dragons, knowing that initial friendliness would spread like a benevolent plague through the Kingdom camp.

It wasn't like Dorothea could blame them. After all, while no prejudice was ever truly justified, it _was _a bit much to ask soldiers who had been fighting and dying to dragons and dragon-worshippers to simply accept Nabateans into their midst.

But Dorothea was determined to work on it, and Edelgard went along with her, doing as she asked. It was... amazing, to see Dorothea in action, Dorothea getting her audience to feel what she wanted them to feel with just a few words, the way she had back at the Mittelfrank Opera. The rebel Emperor of Adrestia assisted where she could, doing as Dorothea asked, and hoping it helped.

But even as the troops eat, drink and make merry, plans were in place to continue the war. Volunteers were asked for by both groups, to go scouting out the Great Bridge of Myrddin; they would be on the move soon. Dorothea would have liked more time to let this new thing congeal, grow, become more stable... but the Bridge had to be taken.

She had ideas for how to do that, of course; she was the stormsong, she had tricks and tricks up her expansive sleeves. Even a plan to just ignore the Bridge and make their own ramshackle version with draconic help, if it came to that, though she would prefer not to use so many resources and so much _time_.

Still... she worried. She didn't know what incompetence had stricken Lorenz here at Gronder, but she feared that it might have been down to his officers and not himself, and that he would be display his more usual skill and talent while defending the Bridge.

So volunteers were asked for, and two answered, who would miss the feast- and scout out the Great Bridge of Myrddin.

That afternoon, the two volunteers, a purple-haired archer of Adrestia and a red-headed knight of Faerghus, alongside some of their soldiers, set out, to reach the Bridge late in the next day.

-

The next day, they were riding along in comfortable silence when the Faerghi decided to break it.

“ So do you still write?” Sylvain asked. Bernadetta startled.

“ Oh my- Goddess-in-Byleth, you _remember _that?!?” she asked. He nodded.

“ Yep,” he said, laughing. “ Hell, I still have the manuscript! I kept meaning to give it back to you- I've been annotating it- but then... well, you know. It's actually in my bag at camp... been... keeping it like a combination of a memorial and a good luck charm.”

He shrugged, a bit embarrassed at the admittance, then laughed. “ I mean, I guess it worked, considering I'm still alive. When those stories started to circulate, it also gave me a great conversation piece.”

“ Stories?” Bernie asked.

He nodded, as they rode amidst their soldiers. This area, so near the great Airmid River, mightiest of Fodlan's waters, was strange, almost ghostly. There was thinner forest here, newer growth, but they constantly passed empty homes and houses, which was slowing their movement considerably, having to check each of them as they passed for fear of ambush. This area waas once heavily populated as trade flowed into both nations from the other, either across the Bridge or carried by small boats, but the war had cleared it out, the lucky running to other places, the unlucky dying in mass slaughters.

The Federation duo- who were missing the feast- had already found a few people in some of the empty houses, Leceister troops who'd been hiding; most surrendered, though one group had decided to fight back, a decision that had lasted up until Sylvain set the house on fire with a casually tossed fireball. They'd surrendered after that; fire was a bad way to die.

The prisoners they'd gathered, which was considerable for a mission that was technically just scouting, were in a wagon Bernie had brought along for the purpose. She was a Black Eagle; she was always prepared.

That, and Dorothea had figured there'd be stragglers from the Leceister forces in the area. Good old Dorothea; five years of practice made her one hell of a strategist.

As they stopped so the troops could check yet another empty house, this one attached to a watermill, Sylvain responded.

“ Yeah,” the redhead said. “ About the Eagles. About, heh,  _Fearless Bear_ , I think they call you?”

Bernie shyly looked away. “ I mean, yeah...”

Sylvain gave her a self-aware smirk, and then said something Bernie would never have associated with the boy she remembered.

“ If I'm making you uncomfortable, I'll stop talking,” he said. “ I apologize, if I've overstepped.”

...Sylvain didn't apologize to women... but it had been five years. People grew up, it seemed, and not just among the Eagles.

“ It's okay,” she said. “ I just... I'm nervous around people, still... except the Eagles. But even with them... I just... talking makes me feel awkward. I prefer fighting.”

He nodded, and whatever he was going to say was lost as a horse, with rider, tore out of the back of the watermill from some entrance they couldn't see, turning as it left the building past the guards and going straight at them, a panicked face over a faded yellow breastplate of Leceister.

Sylvain's hand was going for his lance on reflex at the sound and noise of the rider's sudden appearance, but even as his fingers closed on it an arrow whipped past his head, so close it brushed his hair. The arrow sank directly into the horse's forehead, killing it instantly and sending its twitching body sprawling in the dirt, flinging the Leceister soldier sprawling face-down onto the ground in rather comical fashion.

“ Next arrow goes into _your _head,” said a firm, commanding voice next to Sylvain, and it took him a solid second to realize it was Bernie's voice, _what the hell?_ She had an arrow out and drawn, too, already aimed; it was no idle threat. “ Surrender.”

“ I surrender!” the Leceister woman said, voice muffled with her face head down in the dirt. “ Goddess' teeth, don't kill me!”

“ Keep cooperating and I won't,” Bernie said, before turning her head to her troops, keeping her bow drawn on the enemy soldier. “ Tie her up and toss her in the wagon.”

The matter was done quickly and efficiently, the soldier having no interest in resisting- she'd just been trying to make a break for it, and in all honesty had never even noticed the two people in front of her in her panic. Sylvain stared at Bernie for the entire process, trying to reconcile what he was seeing with his own memories, and the archer finally noticed once all was done.

“ Why- what?” she asked defensively, and Sylvain shook his head, laughing.

“ Nothing,” he said, thinking of the stories he'd heard, of a warrior on horseback who feared nothing, who acted quickly and decisively in the heat of battle.

He had a story about that same woman to add to the pile, now.

“ Nothing,” he said again, just grinning, and they rode in comfortable silence once more.

That silence continued as they traveled, having no other surprises in empty buildings, finally reaching the bridge some hours behind schedule. They had taken a long way around, deliberately, having found no patrols, no guards, no... _anything_ that they should have found, the scouting party growing more paranoid by the silent second.

The Faerghi, who had fought Lorenz multiple times, had it the worst. Bernie had only grappled Lorenz once or twice; she didn't know how smart he was. He was far smarter than he'd acted at Gronder, far more dangerous, and Sylvain wondered if there'd been a plan on the Field. Maybe Lorenz had been getting rid of some of his dumber or more savage subordinates, knowing the Bridge would crush any opposition that chased after him despite his reduced numbers... or maybe some internal power play was going on in the Alliance. Those had mostly quieted down once Seiros came to be in charge, but a few of the old rivalries flared from time to time...

Eventually, some distance from the Bridge, Sylvain spoke to Bernie.

“ I'll go see the Bridge, personally,” he said. “ Got a spyglass- I'll take a peek.”

“ I'll go with you,” she said quickly. She did _not _relish the awkward sitting-around-and-waiting-for-reports that inevitably came with staying back at base; it was one reason she was out scouting so often, and the very reason she'd volunteered for this job. The feast they were having sounded like a _nightmare _to her; this was way easier.

“ Be my guest,” Sylvain said. He wouldn't lie, having one of the legendary Eagles beside him- especially one whose prowess he'd just witnessed- made him feel easier. All this silence was... spooky. They should have at _least _heard the low hubbub that marked large inhabited areas by now.

Out they went, riding a short distance before tying up the horses and proceeding on foot. Still silence, until they found a ridge near the road right before the Bridge proper, climbed it... and saw a vision straight out of hell.

Bodies. Bodies and bodies and bodies. Piled not high but wide, a long, long field of bodies, starting before the Bridge and crossing it to touch Leceister on the other side, the corpses small at this distance but still obvious. Humans and horses and pegasi and wyverns, all laying together, all one in front of the only truly equal force in the world, an entire field of reaped souls.

They were both silent for a long moment as they looked at the bodies, Sylvain finally remembering his spyglass and bringing it up to his eyes.

“ I... I don't see any wounds,” he said. “ Or at least, not on all the bodies. But there's a lot of people grabbing at their throats...”

“ Choked?” Bernie suggested. She'd seen it often enough; necks were a good place to put arrows, not a lot of people thought to armor up there. “ But this many... they had to have died all at once. Nobody would approach that, not after seeing so much death.”

“ No,” Sylvain said. “ A spell?”

“ Maybe,” she said, frowning. “ Never heard of a spell that could cover such a big area, but I suppose anything's possible... I'm going in closer. Warn me if anyone approaches.”

“ Holy shit, really?” Sylvain said, but she was already going in, crawling down the hill, quick and quiet.

_Fearless Bear_, he thought again; no wonder that first adjective was there, she was just... going in, walking up to the bodies. Sylvain found it hard to take his eyes off her to keep watch, mostly out of sheer disbelief at her ballsiness. Nothing approached as she reached the closest dead man, a mustachioed fellow and his horse, one hand on the reins as the other was on his throat.

She was checking the body, put a gloved finger on it before rubbing it against her thumb.

“ Poison!” she called back to him. “ I think. There's a kind of... sticky film on them. Dried.”

“ If it's on them...” Sylvain thought, and he glanced up with his spyglass. There, at the top of the Bridge... looked rather like pipes, didn't they?

“ I'm coming to join you,” he yelled down, crawling down after her. They really _should _go get their troops, but this was too strange, too interesting to leave at the moment.

As he reached her, he said, “ I see pipes at the Bridge's top. If it's poison on their skin, then it might have been sprayed on them. It'd explain why everyone seems to be dead; if it was ingested poison, well, you wouldn't be able to touch it for one, but you'd never get this many people at a go.”

Bernie nodded, withdrawing two flasks from her belt. “ Linhardt made these,” she said. “ Kind of a super antidote; works on most stuff. Not everything, but hey, it might help? Drink it and I'll drink mine and we'll keep exploring.”

Down it went; tasted... kind of like watermelon, which was weird. He handed her bottle back to her, and then the duo set off, stepping over the bodies, feeling like the last two survivors in Fodlan before this apocalyptic scene.

“ Poison...” Bernie said softly as they walked, taking care not to step on bodies. “ From the pipes... I wonder if Claude's behind this.”

“ He _was _a big fan of poison,” Sylvain said, as he looked into the open eyes of a dead knight. “ Maybe he had a trick up his sleeve to kill us with. We take the Bridge and bam! Poison kills all of us. But you know, mechanical stuff, it's tricky... I wonder if we just got lucky, if maybe his poison stunt backfired on him.”

“ I would _love _to have that lucky of a break,” Bernie answered, barely avoiding tripping over a dead wyvern's outstretched wing. “ Between that and Gronder going so well, we might win this war yet!”

Sylvain chuckled as they reached the Bridge's middle, finding a squat command center that, by the array of corpses before it and their positions, looked to have been besieged in its last moments.

“ I'll check it out,” he said. Fearless Bear that she was, he was still a knight of Faerghus; he'd go in first this time. “ Cover me.”

“ Okay,” she answered, bow out and drawn in the same breath, Sylvain inching forward past several dead wyverns and other bodies as he headed to the command post.

Inside, he smelled ashes- fire? Dead wyverns and a burned desk before him, nothing to his left, and to his right...

His jaw actually dropped. He'd never had that happen before, but now it did; his mouth fell open for a long moment before he recovered.

“ Umm, Bernie?” Sylvain called behind himself when he could talk again, staring at a sight he could _not _be seeing... but his stubborn eyes kept singing the same song to his brain, so he _had _to believe it. “ I think you need to come see this!”

There, sitting against the pale white wall, looking at peace for a corpse, was Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, one of the Golden Deer, direct servants of Seiros. Lorenz, who had been the _best _of the Golden Deer, almost honorable, who had somehow matured from the arrogant fop he'd been to the one servant of the Alliance who would honor any deal he made. The dead man's hands were stained with blood and ash, but the way he was sitting felt almost _posed_, prepared, somehow, so that he would be found like this.

And painted on the wall behind him in red and black, his body sitting so that they appeared to be emanating from his shoulders, were the great spread wings of a Black Eagle, drawn in the ash and blood on his hands.

“ Mother_fucker_,” Sylvain said with all the reverence of a prayer, as his mind raced to explain what he was seeing, and came to conclusions that seemed unbelievable.

Bernie arrived, looked- gasped, slackjawed, same as he had been.

“ No,” she said, “ no, no, Dorothea has spies everywhere but it _can't _be, she never breathed a _word _that we might have had a _Deer_...”

“ But that doesn't make any sense,” Sylvain said, even as his mind, always sharp, began to _make _it make sense. Lorenz, always the best of the Deer, his family traditional enemies of the Riegans that Claude belonged to. Lorenz, who even the Kingdom, whom he fought the most, considered a man of honor. Lorenz, who had been so incompetent at Gronder, when his skill was well-known...

“ Felix... Felix never could figure out what he was sending out,” Sylvain said. Most people wouldn't know of any of Felix's work as Dimitri's spymaster, but Sylvain was his lover; and now, now that meant he had an idea of what was going on. “ Our best spies never _could _figure out what he was doing, what he was sending...”

“ He was communicating with us,” Bernie breathed. “ Oh, Goddess-in-Byleth, holy _shit_, Sylvain, Lorenz was working for us!”

“ Dorothea didn't tell you?” Sylvain said. Bernie shook her head.

“ No, she's always been good at keeping secrets, I just... Sylvain! **Sylvain!** Holy shit!”

She was shaking his shoulder, so stunned she had to share her nervous energy somehow. Mid-shake, Sylvain noticed something in the dead man's hands.

“ Hey, he's- something here...” he said, reaching down with one hand and plucking it delicately from his grip, a thing that turned out to be a logbook, on which was written three sentences and a single drawing.

The Faerghi and the Adrestian read the last words of a Leceisterman together.

_ Leceister resists. Seiros fears Eagles; she should fear the Deer. We are on your side, Edelgard. _

And beneath, a crown of antlers in Adrestian reds and blacks.

“ Son of a  _ bitch _ ,” Sylvain said. “ Not just one Deer-”

“ No,” Bernie said, “ that doesn't make any  _ sense _ -”

“ I... no, you know what?” Sylvain said.

“ I don't know anything now,” Bernadetta replied, and Sylvain would have laughed except he felt the same way. “ But... what?”

“ This is above my pay grade,” Sylvain said. “ Let's do what we were supposed to- let's report back what we've scouted out.”

They raced back to Gronder, pausing only once for short sleep that night, minds still abuzz with this thing that could not be.

( And at Claude's side in the Locket, hidden in his shadow, the ghost of a good man smiled, knowing his message had been received.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like a year later, I finally tell people what Lorenz wrote and drew. :D Hope it was worth the wait!


End file.
